Enery efficient joint delivery of unicast and multicase services through rate-splitting multiple-access approaches for the sixth-generation wireless

Background
The BBC's vision is that, in the future, all media content will be delivered via IP networks, providing linear, on-demand, and other personalised services and where access to these services out of the home and on the move would be provided via mobile broadband networks.
Previous mobile broadband technology generations (e.g. 4G and 5G) have been mainly designed to maximise the data throughput and minimise latency of the system as key criteria. However, little or no consideration has been given to the overall energy efficiency or sustainability of the networks.
The project will consider the theory and applications of general and powerful transmission frameworks based on Rate-Splitting Multiple Access (RSMA). RSMA is a novel physical layer transmission strategy that bridges and generalizes many existing strategies by decoding part of the interference and treating the remaining part of the interference as noise. Recent research shows that RSMA provides room for spectral efficiency, energy efficiency and quality of service enhancements in a wide range of network loads and user deployments, robustness against imperfect channel knowledge, as well as feedback overhead and complexity reduction. In the paper [1], RSMA has been applied to a joint multicast and unicast setting and has been shown to provide significant spectral and energy efficiency benefits over all existing baselines.

[1] Y. Mao, B. Clerckx and V.O.K. Li, "Rate-Splitting for Multi-Antenna Non-Orthogonal Unicast and Multicast Transmission: Spectral and Energy Efficiency Analysis," IEEE Trans. on Commun., vol 67, no 12, pp. 8754-8770, Dec 2019.

Objective
The overall goal of the project is to investigate innovative physical layer signal processing approaches that improve the energy efficiency and sustainability of future mobile broadband networks for the delivery of IP multicast and unicast (live & on-demand) services. The project will focus on multiuser multi-antenna systems delivering multicast and unicast signals in mobile environments. The aims include:
-To understand the state-of-the-art physical layer approaches and system models for the delivery of multicast and unicast signals in 5G mobile broadband networks.

-Establish limitations of existing system modelling to incorporate representative energy consumption at the different stages of the system.

-Investigate and build system models of RSMA considering energy consumption at the different stages of the system. Spectral and energy efficiencies will be considered under the general framework of imperfect channel knowledge.

-Design of transceiver architectures for RSMA in unicast and multicast services.

-Demonstrate the applicability and performance evaluation of the developed RSMA transceiver architectures for the delivery of multicast and unicast signals in 6G deployments.

-Disseminate the work to a wide audience, e.g., the BBC, academia, standard bodies, and the greater public.
Work Description and Methodology
-Review of the state-of-the-art physical layer approaches and system models for the delivery of multicast and unicast signals in 5G mobile broadband networks.

-Identification of limitations of existing modelling at transmitters and receivers to incorporate representative energy consumption.

-Development of system models of RSMA for considering energy consumption at the transmitter and receivers. Spectral and energy efficiencies will be considered under the general framework of imperfect channel knowledge.

-Design of transceiver architectures for RSMA in unicast and multicast services.

-Performance evaluation of the developed RSMA transceiver architectures for delivering multicast and unicast signals in 6G deployments with system simulations.
Research area: RF and microwave communications