Full-Duplex Cooperative Rate-Splitting for Multigroup Multicast With SWIPT

We propose a full-duplex cooperative rate-splitting (FD-CRS) scheme in a downlink two-group multicast system. At the transmitter, two distinct messages requested by the two groups respectively are split and then encoded into one common stream and two private streams, based on the principles of rate splitting multiple access (RSMA). The cell-center-users (CCUs) in one group decode the common stream and their own private stream successively, then cooperatively form a distributed beamformer to assist the cell-edge-users (CEUs) in common stream transmission. To make full utilization of the time resources during cooperation, all the CCUs operate in FD mode to enable information receiving and forwarding simultaneously. Moreover, since it is unfair to sacrifice the cooperator’ energy to forward, each CCU is enabled to harvest energy from the received signal by adopting power-splitting protocol. With the objective of minimizing the system transmission power while guaranteeing all the groups’ target rates, an optimization problem is formulated to jointly design the beamformers, message splitting and power-splitting ratio. We reformulate the non-convex problem by using the difference of convex (DC) programming, and then propose an iterative algorithm based on successive convex approximation to solve it to obtain a local minimum. Further, a robust algorithm combining the semi-positive definite relaxation (SDR) technique and penalty function method is developed for the case with imperfect channel state information. Although our proposed FD-CRS scheme adopts the seemingly energy-wasting wireless power transfer technique, the simulation results still confirm the superiority of the proposed scheme, i.e., it outperforms the other baseline schemes in terms of power consumption under various user deployment, network loads and target rates. That is attributed to the comprehensive utilization of FD cooperation gain, spatial multiplexing gain as well as power multiplexing gain.