Rate-splitting precoding for future point-to-multipoint communication.

Abstract

As an alternative to classic point-to-point (PTP) unicast transmission, point-to-multipoint (PTM) broadcast/multicast transmission offers simultaneous transmission of the same content to multiple receivers, using just a fixed amount of radio resources for a given coverage area. Such transmission capability has been kept enhancing in the legacy 4th Generation long-term evolution (4G-LTE), namely evolved multimedia broadcast multicast service (eMBMS). As the current multicast systems in the eMBMS use time division multiplexing (TDM) to separate different transmissions, which, however, can cause inefficient utilization of scarce radio resources, and even becomes an impediment in developing such systems to meet new use cases in the 5th generation (5G). To tackle this problem, we proposed a Rate-Splitting (RS) based precoding design to improve the multicast system performances. However, as an emerging precoding technology, various theoretical questions, and practical issues remain to be abundantly investigated. To this end, the overall objective of the proposed research is to first investigate the eMBMS system with both LTE and new radio (NR) specifications and then propose effective approaches i.e., Rate-Splitting to improve the PTM system performance. Firstly, we conduct a study of the eMBMS technique from the physical layer perspective, comparing between the two major techniques of the eMBMS i.e. multicast broadcast single frequency network (MBSFN) and single cell point to multipoint (SC-PTM), via link-level simulations. A selection of key performance indicators (KPIs) defined by the ITU-R for the IMT-2020 evaluation has been evaluated on data channel, e.g., physical downlink shared channel (PDSCH). This performance evaluation serves as a benchmark for comparison with a potential 5G broadcast solution. Furthermore, we investigate the error performance, mobility tolerance, and coverage of the control channel, e.g., physical downlink control channel (PDCCH) based on both LTE and NR specifications. Secondly, we target at an overloaded downlink multicarrier multigroup multicast system with RS under the assumption of Gaussian input, looking into both the achievable rate and error performance. Two optimization methods are provided, i.e., weight minimum mean square error (WMMSE) and successive convex approximation (SCA), to jointly optimize the precoding matrix and subcarrier allocation. Simulation results reveal that RS provides a substantial user experience improvement compared to the state-of-the-art multicast transmission schemes. Thirdly, we investigate the RS under the constraint of finite-alphabet constellations. We formulate an optimization problem that maximizes the weighted sum rate of the RS system and solve the problem with an iterative gradient descent algorithm to find the optimal precoder. The simulation results show that compared to the traditional linear precoding scheme, RS can reach the maximum achievable sum-rate with a less transmit power. Then, based on the obtained RS precoder with corresponding constellation inputs, we look into the error performance, e.g., bit error rate (BER) and symbol error rate (SER) of the proposed RS scheme, with channel coding and iterative soft detection and decoding. On top of the performance improvement in terms of achievable rate, the proposed RS scheme also has a better error performance compared to other considered linear precoding schemes in overloaded scenarios.