Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Imperial College London
Doi
Abstract
Rate-splitting multiple access (RSMA) has emerged as a powerful and flexible
non-orthogonal transmission, multiple access (MA) and interference management
scheme for future wireless networks. This thesis is concerned with the application of
RSMA to non-terrestrial communication and sensing networks. Various scenarios
and algorithms are presented and evaluated.
First, we investigate a novel multigroup/multibeam multicast beamforming strategy
based on RSMA in both terrestrial multigroup multicast and multibeam satellite
systems with imperfect channel state information at the transmitter (CSIT). The
max-min fairness (MMF)-degree of freedom (DoF) of RSMA is derived and shown
to provide gains compared with the conventional strategy. The MMF beamforming
optimization problem is formulated and solved using the weighted minimum mean
square error (WMMSE) algorithm. Physical layer design and link-level simulations
are also investigated. RSMA is demonstrated to be very promising for multigroup
multicast and multibeam satellite systems taking into account CSIT uncertainty
and practical challenges in multibeam satellite systems.
Next, we extend the scope of research from multibeam satellite systems to satellite-
terrestrial integrated networks (STINs). Two RSMA-based STIN schemes are
investigated, namely the coordinated scheme relying on CSI sharing and the co-
operative scheme relying on CSI and data sharing. Joint beamforming algorithms
are proposed based on the successive convex approximation (SCA) approach to
optimize the beamforming to achieve MMF amongst all users. The effectiveness and
robustness of the proposed RSMA schemes for STINs are demonstrated.
Finally, we consider RSMA for a multi-antenna integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) system, which simultaneously serves multiple communication users
and estimates the parameters of a moving target. Simulation results demonstrate
that RSMA is beneficial to both terrestrial and multibeam satellite ISAC systems by
evaluating the trade-off between communication MMF rate and sensing Cramer-Rao
bound (CRB).Open Acces
