Antenna Coding Design for Pixel Antenna Empowered Rate-Splitting Multiple Access

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel pixel antenna empowered RSMA framework for MU-MISO systems, enhancing spectral efficiency through joint precoding and antenna coding design under imperfect CSI.

Contribution

It proposes a new integration of pixel antennas with RSMA, including an optimization algorithm and an efficient antenna coder selection method, to improve spectral efficiency.

Findings

Pixel antenna empowered RSMA outperforms fixed antenna RSMA and SDMA in spectral efficiency.

RSMA achieves similar performance to SDMA with simpler antenna configurations.

The proposed algorithms effectively optimize precoding and antenna coding under imperfect CSI.

Abstract

This work explores the integration of pixel antennas and rate-splitting multiple access (RSMA) to enhance spectral efficiency in multi-user multiple-input single-output (MU-MISO) systems. Pixel antennas offer controllable antenna characteristics via antenna coding from the analog domain, whereas RSMA provides efficient interference management from the digital domain. We propose a novel pixel antenna empowered RSMA transmission framework where each user employs a pixel antenna. Under imperfect channel state information at the transmitter, we formulate a joint precoding and antenna coding design problem to maximize the ergodic sum-rate. An alternating optimization algorithm based on the weighted minimum mean square error (WMMSE) approach and the successive exhaustive Boolean optimization (SEBO) is first developed to solve the problem. We then propose an efficient online antenna coder selection algorithm relying on an offline-designed codebook to reduce computational complexity. Numerical results show that the proposed pixel antenna empowered RSMA significantly improves spectral efficiency compared to both RSMA with fixed antennas and space-division multiple access (SDMA) employing the same pixel antenna configuration. Moreover, compared to SDMA, RSMA maintains the same performance with a simpler pixel antenna configuration or a smaller codebook size.