This study delves into the capabilities of reconfig- urable intelligent surfaces (RISs) in enhancing bidirectional non- orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) networks. The proposed approach partitions RIS to optimize the channel conditions for NOMA users, improving NOMA gain and eliminating the re- quirement for uplink (UL) power control. The proposed approach is rigorously evaluated under four practical operational regimes; 1) Quality-of-Service (QoS) sufficient regime, 2) RIS and power efficient regime, 3) max-min fair regime, and 4) maximum throughput regime, each subject to both UL and downlink (DL) QoS constraints. By leveraging decoupled nature of RIS portions and base station (BS) transmit power, closed-form solutions are derived to demonstrate how optimal RIS partitioning can meet UL-QoS requirements while optimal BS power control can ensure DL-QoS compliance. Our analytical findings are validated through simulations, highlighting the significant benefits that RISs can bring to the NOMA networks in the aforementioned operational scenarios.

This paper proposes a novel approach for enhancing physical layer security (PLS) in wireless networks by utilizing a combination of reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) and artificial noise (AN). The proposed aerial RIS (A-RIS) concept utilizes a RIS-attached unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that hovers over the network area to improve the signal quality for legitimate users and jam that of illegitimate ones. We propose a method of virtually partitioning the RIS, such that the partition phase shifts are configured to improve the intended signal at a legitimate user while simultaneously increasing the impact of AN on illegitimate users. Additionally, thanks to the availability of closed-form optimal RIS portions, the proposed deployment approaches converge in less than a second, making it suitable for dynamic A-RIS deployment.