Link-Level Performance of Rate-Splitting based Downlink Multiuser MISO Systems

This work provides the first link level performance evaluation of the Rate-Splitting (RS) based precoding scheme in a downlink multi-user multiple input single output (MU-MISO) system. Contrary to the existing works on the RS precoding that mostly focused on the sum rate or minimum rate maximization, this work bridges the optimization results with the bit error rate (BER) performance, initiating the RS software implementation. We demonstrate that, in an overloaded scenario, the conventional precoding schemes suffer from the BER error floor that corresponds to their rate saturation, which can be overcome by the RS-based strategy that adding the message decodability of certain users with the interference-limited message rate.