RIS-Aided RSMA Improves the Latency vs. Energy Trade-off in the Finite Block Length MIMO Downlink

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that combining reconfigurable intelligent surfaces with rate splitting multiple access significantly enhances energy efficiency and reduces latency in MIMO downlink systems, especially under strict reliability demands.

Contribution

It introduces a RIS-aided RSMA scheme that outperforms traditional SDMA in latency and energy efficiency, highlighting the synergistic benefits and scalability of RIS in such systems.

Findings

RSMA reduces latency to 13% of SDMA.

RIS amplifies RSMA gains more than SDMA as size increases.

RSMA provides substantial benefits under ultra-reliable low-latency conditions.

Abstract

We simultaneously minimize the latency and improve energy efficiency (EE) of the multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) rate splitting multiple access (RSMA) downlink, aided by a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS). Our results show that RSMA improves the EE and may reduce the delay to 13\% of that of spatial division multiple access (SDMA). Moreover, RIS and RSMA support each other synergistically, while an RIS operating without RSMA provides limited benefits in terms of latency and cannot effectively mitigate interference. {Furthermore, increasing the RIS size amplifies the gains of RSMA more significantly than those of SDMA, without altering the fundamental EE-latency trade-offs.} Results also show that latency increases with more stringent reliability requirements, and RSMA yields more significant gains under such conditions, making it eminently suitable for energy-efficient ultra-reliable low-latency communication (URLLC) scenarios.