We consider a downlink multiuser MISO system with bounded errors in the
Channel State Information at the Transmitter (CSIT). We first look at the
robust design problem of achieving max-min fairness amongst users (in the
worst-case sense). Contrary to the conventional approach adopted in literature,
we propose a rather unorthodox design based on a Rate-Splitting (RS) strategy.
Each user's message is split into two parts, a common part and a private part.
All common parts are packed into one super common message encoded using a
public codebook, while private parts are independently encoded. The resulting
symbol streams are linearly precoded and simultaneously transmitted, and each
receiver retrieves its intended message by decoding both the common stream and
its corresponding private stream. For CSIT uncertainty regions that scale with
SNR (e.g. by scaling the number of feedback bits), we prove that a RS-based
design achieves higher max-min (symmetric) Degrees of Freedom (DoF) compared to
conventional designs (NoRS). For the special case of non-scaling CSIT (e.g.
fixed number of feedback bits), and contrary to NoRS, RS can achieve a
non-saturating max-min rate. We propose a robust algorithm based on the
cutting-set method coupled with the Weighted Minimum Mean Square Error (WMMSE)
approach, and we demonstrate its performance gains over state-of-the art
designs. Finally, we extend the RS strategy to address the Quality of Service
(QoS) constrained power minimization problem, and we demonstrate significant
gains over NoRS-based designs.Comment: Accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Signal Processin
