Abstract
The Blue Economy is undergoing a transformative
shift driven by advancements in green shipping, automation,
and digitalization. As maritime operations become increasingly
complex, the demand for high-capacity, low-latency, and reliable
communication has intensified. To address these challenges, we
investigate user pairing with Intelligent Reflecting Surface (IRS)-
assisted Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) systems in
maritime composite fading channels. IRS enhances signal quality
by intelligently optimizing the propagation environment. A key
limitation in conventional NOMA user pairing is that unpaired
users are often assigned to Orthogonal Multiple Access (OMA),
reducing overall spectral efficiency. To overcome this, we study
and investigate an efficient Virtual Pairing (VP) algorithm, which
enables a strong near-user to be virtually paired with multiple
far-users, ensuring efficient resource utilization and eliminating
the inefficiencies associated with conventional NOMA and OMA
pairing schemes. Additionally, we analyze the impact of wave
fluctuations on maritime channels to evaluate system robustness
in dynamic environments. Matlab simulations demonstrate that
the proposed algorithm outperforms conventional NOMA and
OMA pairing schemes by 6 bps/Hz with 40 IRS elements. These
findings highlight the potential of IRS-assisted uplink NOMA
virtual pairing as a scalable, high-performance solution for next-
generation maritime communication networks.