Rate Splitting in FDD Massive MIMO Systems Based on the Second Order Statistics of Transmission Channels

In this work, we present new results for the application of rate splitting multiple access (RSMA) to the downlink (DL) of a massive multiple-input-multiple-output system (MIMO) operating in frequency-division-duplex (FDD) mode. We propose a statistical precoding design relying on the channels’ second-order information when one-layer RS is implemented. The advantage of the statistical precoding lies in simplifying the precoder design by basing the optimization objective on the slowly-varying channel covariance matrices instead of the fast-changing instantaneous channel estimates. To this end, we use the so- called bilinear precoder, which was shown in Neumann et al. (2018) and Ben Amor et al. (2020) to have limited performance in the high SNR regime due to the imperfect channel state information (CSI) available at the base station (BS). We formulate the DL throughput maximization problem based on a widely used lower bound on the achievable sum rate and propose an iterative approach to solve the underlying optimization problem. Numerical results demonstrate the benefit of implementing one-layer RS. Furthermore, the proposed iterative approach achieves excellent results in terms of spectral efficiency compared to the state-of-the-art techniques.