Rate-Splitting Multiple Access for UAV-Based RIS-Enabled Interference-Limited Vehicular Communication System

Abstract

Rate-splitting multiple access (RSMA) has emerged as a novel generalized multiple access technology which can control the interference in multi-user communication systems. Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) has also been proven to improve the spectral efficiency in the next-generation (beyond 5 G (B5G) and 6 G) wireless communication networks. Thus, in this paper, we explore the RSMA scheme for RIS-enabled unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) based multi-user vehicular communication network in the presence of co-channel interference. The communication between the UAV and the desired vehicle takes place through an RIS along with the direct link and is interfered by multiple interfering vehicles operating in the same spectrum. After deriving the approximate cumulative distribution function (CDF) of common and private stream signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratios (SINRs) at the desired vehicle in the interference limited scenario, we obtain an expression for the average outage probability (AOP) over the complete flying duration of the UAV. Furthermore, the optimum RSMA power allocation coefficients in each time slot of UAV flight duration are obtained by minimizing the Sum-AOP over all the desired vehicles. The performance of the proposed RSMA based RIS-aided vehicular communication network is compared with (a) RSMA based network without RIS and (b) non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) based RIS-aided counterpart. The numerical results reveal the superiority of RSMA over NOMA and the significance of deploying RIS in considered vehicular communication network. The analytical results are corroborated with Monte Carlo simulations.