Resource Allocation for Multicarrier Rate-Splitting Multiple Access System

In this article, we investigate the resource allocation problem for the multicarrier rate-splitting multiple access (RSMA) systems. On each subcarrier, messages are non-orthogonal superimposed on the power domain through the one-layer RSMA scheme. A novel three-step resource allocation algorithm is proposed to deal with the non-convex problem of sum rate maximization. In step 1, assuming average power allocation among subcarriers, we obtain the power distribution factors of the users in a single subcarrier by converting this problem into a difference of convex program (DCP), and approximate it by its first-order Taylor expansion. In step 2, we convert the user-subcarrier matching problem into an assignment problem and use the Hungarian algorithm to solve it. In step 3, the optimized power allocation algorithm is used to calculate the power allocation among the subcarriers, and then updates the power vector for each user. Numerical results show that our proposed three-step resource allocation algorithm could achieve comparable sum rate performance to the existing near-optimal solution with much lower computational complexity and outperforms orthogonal multiple access (OMA) scheme.