Rate Splitting and its Applications

Rate Splitting & its Applications

MIMO has grown beyond the original point-to-point channel and nowadays refers to a diverse range of centralised and distributed deployments. Numerous techniques have been developed in the last decade for MIMO wireless networks, including among others MU-MIMO, CoMP, Massive MIMO, NOMA, millimeter-wave MIMO.

In this talk, we introduce a general and powerful transmission framework based on Rate-Splitting (RS) for MIMO networks that consists in decoding part of the interference and in treating the remaining part of the interference as noise.

This capability of RS to partially decode interference and partially treat interference as noise enables to softly bridge and outperform existing multiple access techniques. Through information and communication theoretic analysis, RS is shown to be optimal (from a Degrees-of-Freedom region perspective) in a number of scenarios and provide significant benefits in terms of spectral efficiencies, reliability and CSI feedback overhead reduction over conventional strategies used/envisioned in LTE-A/5G that rely on fully treat interference as noise or fully decode interference.

The gains of RS will be demonstrated in a wide range of scenarios: multi-user MIMO, massive MIMO, multi-cell MIMO/CoMP, overloaded systems, NOMA, multigroup multicasting, mm-wave communications, communications in the presence of RF impairments and coded caching.  Open problems and challenges will also be discussed.