Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface Empowered Rate-Splitting Multiple Access for Simultaneous Wireless Information and Power Transfer

Rate-splitting multiple access (RSMA) and reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) have been both recognized as promising techniques for 6G. The benefits of combining the two techniques to enhance the spectral and energy efficiency have been recently exploited in communication-only networks. Inspired by the recent advances, in this work we investigate the use of RIS empowered RSMA for simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) with one transmitter concurrently sending information to multiple information receivers (IRs) and transferring energy to multiple energy receivers (ERs). Specifically, we jointly optimize the transmit beamformers and the RIS reflection coefficients to maximize the weighted sum-rate (WSR) of IRs under the harvested energy constraint of ERs and the transmit power constraint. An alternating optimization and successive convex approximation (SCA)-based optimization framework is then raised to address the problem. Numerical results demonstrate that by marrying the benefits of RSMA and RIS, the proposed RIS empowered RSMA achieves a better tradeoff between the WSR of IRs and energy harvested at ERs. In addition, the rate region of RSMA almost coincides with that of SDMA+RIS especially when the two users have similar weights. Therefore, we conclude that RIS empowered RSMA is a promising strategy for SWIPT.