Rate-Splitting Multiple Access for Satellite-Terrestrial Integrated Networks: Benefits of Coordination and Cooperation

This paper investigates the joint beamforming design problem to achieve max-min rate fairness in a satellite-terrestrial integrated network (STIN) where the satellite provides wide coverage to multibeam multicast satellite users (SUs), and the terrestrial base station (BS) serves multiple cellular users (CUs) in a densely populated area. Both the satellite and BS operate in the same frequency band. Since rate-splitting multiple access (RSMA) has recently emerged as a promising strategy for non-orthogonal transmission and robust interference management in multi-antenna wireless networks, we present two RSMA-based STIN schemes, namely the coordinated scheme relying on channel state information (CSI) sharing and the cooperative scheme relying on CSI and data sharing. Our objective is to maximize the minimum fairness rate amongst all SUs and CUs subject to transmit power constraints at the satellite and the BS. A joint beamforming algorithm is proposed to reformulate the original problem into an approximately equivalent convex one, which can be iteratively solved. Moreover, an expectation-based robust joint beamforming algorithm is proposed against the practical environment when the satellite channel phase uncertainties are considered. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our proposed RSMA schemes for STIN and exhibit significant performance gains compared with various baseline strategies.