Fifth-generation (5G) advancements improve transmitter and receiver functionalities, but the propagation environment remains uncontrolled. By changing the phase of impinging waves, reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) have the potential to regulate radio propagation environments. RIS-assisted non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) improves spectrum efficiency while enabling massive connectivity. The uplink outage probability expressions for blind-RIS-NOMA are derived in this work using RIS as a smart reflector (SR) and RIS as an access point (AP). Extensive Monte-Carlo simulations are performed to validate the derived closed-form expressions. The optimal powers to be allocated to the users are also derived in order to maximize the uplink sum capacity. In comparison to the sub-optimal power allocation, the optimal power allocation enhances the sum capacity. In terms of sum capacity for 20 dB signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and 32 reflecting elements, it is demonstrated that the blind-RIS-NOMA surpasses the conventional NOMA by $\approx$38%. The sum capacity and outage performances are enhanced by the addition of RIS elements.

Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) and massive multiple input and multiple output (M-MIMO) are the two major enabling technologies for next-generation networks, capable of providing spectral efficiency (SE), energy efficiency (EE), array gain, spatial multiplexing, and reliability. This work introduces an RIS-assisted millimeter wave (mmWave) M-MIMO system to harvest the advantages of RIS and mmWave M-MIMO systems that are required for beyond fifth-generation (B5G) systems. The performance of the proposed system is evaluated under 3GPP TR 38.901 V16.1.0 5G channel models. Specifically, we considered indoor hotspot (InH)—indoor office and urban microcellular (UMi)—street canyon channel environments for 28 GHz and 73 GHz mmWave frequencies. Using the SimRIS channel simulator, the channel matrices were generated for the required number of realizations. Monte Carlo simulations were executed extensively to evaluate the proposed system’s average bit error rate (ABER) and sum rate performances, and it was observed that increasing the number of transmit antennas from 4 to 64 resulted in a better performance gain of ∼10 dB for both InH—indoor office and UMi—street canyon channel environments. The improvement of the number of RIS elements from 64 to 1024 resulted in ∼7 dB performance gain. It was also observed that ABER performance at 28 GHz was better compared to 73 GHz by at least ∼5 dB for the considered channels. The impact of finite resolution RIS on the considered 5G channel models was also evaluated. ABER performance degraded for 2-bit finite resolution RIS compared to ideal infinite resolution RIS by ∼6 dB.