Rate Splitting Multiple Access for Multi-Antenna Multi-Carrier Joint Communications and Jamming

Abstract: Rate-Splitting Multiple Access (RSMA) is a robust multiple access scheme for downlink multi-antenna wireless networks. In this work, we investigate a novel application of RSMA for joint communications and jamming with a Multi-Carrier (MC) waveform in Multiple Input Single Output (MISO) Broadcast Channel (BC). Our aim is to simultaneously communicate with Information Users (IU) and jam Adversarial Users (AU) to disrupt their communications 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 IUs and statistical CSIT for AUs. The optimal information and jamming precoders are designed to maximize the sum-rate under jamming power constraints on the pilot subcarriers of AUs, a jamming method considered to be among the most destructive methods for MC waveforms under the considered system model. We compare the sum-rate performance of RSMA and Space Division Multiple Access (SDMA) schemes by numerical results to demonstrate that RSMA achieves a significant sum-rate gain compared to SDMA.