Rate-Splitting Multiple Access with a SIC-Free Receiver: An Experimental Study
This addresses the error propagation issue in RSMA receivers for wireless communication systems, representing an incremental improvement over existing SIC-based methods.
The paper tackled the error propagation problem in Rate-Splitting Multiple Access (RSMA) receivers by developing a SIC-free receiver based on joint demapping, which was tested in a two-user MISO prototype. The results showed that the proposed receiver provides stronger reliability and better practicality over a wider operating range, with all observations consistent with theoretical expectations.
Most Rate-Splitting Multiple Access (RSMA) implementations rely on successive interference cancellation (SIC) at the receiver, whose performance is inherently limited by error propagation during common-stream decoding. This paper addresses this issue by developing a SIC-free RSMA receiver based on joint demapping (JD), which directly evaluates bit vectors over a composite constellation. Using a two-user Multiple-Input Single-Output (MISO) prototype, we conduct over-the-air measurements to systematically compare SIC and JD-based receivers. The results show that the proposed SIC-free receiver provides stronger reliability and better practicality over a wider operating range, with all observations being consistent with theoretical expectations.