Rate-Splitting Multiple Access for Multi-Antenna Downlink Communication Systems: Spectral and Energy Efficiency Tradeoff

Abstract

Rate-splitting (RS) has recently been recognized as a promising physical-layer technique for multi-antenna broadcast channels (BC). Due to its ability to partially decode the interference and partially treat the remaining interference as noise, RS is an enabler for a powerful multiple access, namely rate-splitting multiple access (RSMA), that has been shown to achieve higher spectral efficiency (SE) and energy efficiency (EE) than both space division multiple access (SDMA) and non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) in a wide range of user deployments and network loads. As SE maximization and EE maximization are two conflicting objectives in the moderate and high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regimes, the study of the tradeoff between the two criteria is of particular interest. In this work, we address the SE-EE tradeoff by studying the joint SE and EE maximization problem of RSMA in multiple input single output (MISO) BC with rate-dependent circuit power consumption at the transmitter. To tackle the challenges coming from multiple objective functions and rate-dependent circuit power consumption, we first propose two models to transform the original problem into two single-objective problems, namely, weighted-sum method and weighted-power method. A low-complexity algorithm with closed-form solution is proposed to solve each single-objective problem in the two-user system. For the generalized <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$K$ </tex-math></inline-formula> -user system, a successive convex approximation (SCA)-based algorithm is then proposed to optimize the precoders of each transformed problem. Numerical results show that our algorithm converges much faster than existing algorithms. In addition, the performance of RSMA is superior to or equal to SDMA and NOMA in terms of SE, EE and their tradeoff.