Abstract
The incorporation of reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) presents considerable potential for improving the functionality of ground-based terrestrial Internet of Things (IoT) networks. This paper introduces a novel UAV deployment and aerial RIS partitioning mechanism for the uplink non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA)-based IoT networks under practical hardware constraints. The low-cost hardware of IoT devices results in imperfect successive interference cancellation (SIC) and distortion noise due to transceiver hardware impairments (T-HIs). Specifically, we have optimized the aerial RIS partitioning and its deployment to maximize the minimum rate under the impact of imperfect SIC and T-HIs. The numerical results show that the proposed scheme outperforms the benchmark. Through extensive simulations, we prove that the proposed UAV-based aerial RIS-aided uplink NOMA network significantly enhances the max-min fair rate.