Jammer Mitigation in Absorptive RIS-Assisted Uplink NOMA

Journal article, 2026

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is a promising technology for next-generation wireless communication systems due to its enhanced spectral efficiency. However, wireless communication is facing increasing requirements for security. To that end, jamming mitigation using multi-antennas has emerged as an important research topic. In this paper, we consider an uplink NOMA system with a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) that assists the uplink users and, at the same time, mitigates the jammer. Our goal is to minimize the total users’ transmitted power under signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio constraints at the base station. To be effective, typically a high-dimensional RIS is needed, leading to a large optimization problem, which in general faces convergence problems. We propose an iterative algorithm for this high-dimensional non-convex optimization problem that converges with a jammer comprising as many as 64 antennas, and an RIS with 128 elements. More specifically, we introduce a design and optimize the performance of an absorptive RIS (A-RIS). Compared to a standard RIS, we show that an A-RIS can dramatically reduce the users’ required transmit power and successfully mitigate the jammer. The A-RIS is in particular useful in cases when the number of jammer antennas is of the same order as the number of A-RIS elements.