Link Adaptation for Rate Splitting Systems With Partial CSIT

Abstract

Rate Splitting (RS) has emerged as a flexible multiple-access scheme for Multi-User Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MU-MIMO) systems, generalizing more conventional approaches such as linear precoding or Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA), and providing additional robustness against imperfect channel state information at the transmitter. Actual achievable rates cannot be pre-calculated when facing imperfect and/or outdated channel state information at the transmitter (CSIT), so practical real-time mechanisms in the form of link adaptation (LA) are required. The available CSIT is used to design the RS precoders, which can accommodate some degree of robustness, whereas the physical layer feedback reports the outcome of the decoding of the codewords, in the form of acknowledgement (ACK) or negative ACK (NACK), providing the additional meta-robustness needed when the statistical model of CSIT errors is not accurate, and/or the precoders cannot fully track the channel dynamics. We characterize the outage rate region of RS and analyze the convergence of the complete LA-RS system under partial CSIT (non-accurate and non-permanent), providing relevant insights for addressing the adaptation of private and common rates, designing robust precoders with throughput as relevant metric, and handling the time-variant CSIT quality.