RSMA for Hybrid RIS-UAV-Aided Full-Duplex Communications With Finite Blocklength Codes Under Imperfect SIC

Abstract

In this work, we consider a hybrid aerial full-duplex (FD) relaying consisting of a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) mounted over an FD unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) relay operating in decode and forward mode to assist the information transfer between the base station and multiple users. For better spectral efficiency, we investigate the use of rate splitting multiple access (RSMA) in such networks and focus on joint optimization of RSMA parameters, 3D-coordinates of the UAV/RIS, and phase shift matrix at the RIS along with analyzing the outage probability, block error rate (BLER) and achievable weighted sum rate for finite blocklength (FBL) and infinite blocklength (IBL) codes under imperfect successive interference cancellation (SIC) at each user and residual-self interference (RSI) at the UAV. We first formulate the weighted sum rate maximization problem and adopt the block coordinate descent (BCD) method to deal with the non-convex nature of the problem. Thereafter, we propose a BCD-based algorithm that jointly optimizes these parameters using a heuristic approach for optimum power allocation, a Riemannian conjugate gradient-based algorithm to get the optimal phase shift at the RIS, and an iterative algorithm to obtain the optimal UAV/RIS position. It also distributes the common rate among the users optimally. Next, with obtained optimal parameters, we further analyze the performance of the network and derive the closed-form expressions of BLER, outage probability, and average weighted sum rate. We present Monte Carlo simulation-based results to validate the accuracy of the proposed algorithms and derived expressions, and demonstrate the superiority of RSMA over non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) and conventional orthogonal multiple access (OMA) schemes.