Rate-Splitting Multiple Access for Communications and Jamming in Multi-Antenna Multi-Carrier Cognitive Radio Systems

With the increasing number of wireless communication systems and the demand for bandwidth, the wireless medium has become a congested and contested environment. Operating under such an environment brings several challenges, especially for military communication systems, which need to guarantee reliable communication while avoiding interfering with other friendly or neutral systems and denying the enemy systems of service. In this work, we investigate a novel application of Rate-Splitting Multiple Access (RSMA) for joint communications and jamming with a Multi-Carrier (MC) waveform in a multi-antenna Cognitive Radio (CR) system. RSMA is a robust multiple access scheme for downlink multi-antenna wireless networks. RSMA relies on multi-antenna Rate-Splitting (RS) strategy at the transmitter and Successive Interference Cancellation (SIC) at the receivers. By employing RSMA at the secondary transmitter, our aim is to simultaneously communicate with Secondary Users (SUs) and jam Adversarial Users (AUs) to disrupt their communications while limiting the interference to Primary Users (PUs) in a setting where all users perform broadband communications by MC waveforms in their respective networks. We consider the practical setting of imperfect CSI at Transmitter (CSIT) for the SUs and PUs, and statistical CSIT for AUs. We formulate a problem to obtain optimal precoders which maximize the mutual information under interference and jamming power constraints. We propose an Alternating Optimization-Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (AO-ADMM) based algorithm for solving the resulting non-convex problem. We perform an analysis based on Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) conditions to determine the optimal jamming and interference power thresholds that guarantee the feasibility of problem and propose a practical algorithm to calculate the interference power threshold. By simulation results, we demonstrate that RSMA achieves a higher sum-rate performance than Space Division Multiple Access (SDMA) and Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA).