Enhanced User Fairness and Performance for eMBB-URLLC Uplink Traffic with Rate-Splitting based Super-positioning

This paper investigates an unconventional superposition scheme, i.e., rate-splitting multiple access (RSMA) to maximize the overall user fairness and high system performance gain for ultra-reliable low-latency communication (URLLC), enhanced mobile-broadband (eMBB) traffic coexistence in uplink scenarios. In particular, we focus on maximizing the worst-case performance of uplink eMBB and URLLC users when multiplexed in a given resource block using an effective rate-splitting approach among multiple sub-messages. Subsequently, a multi-objective optimization problem (MOOP) is formulated to jointly maximize the worst-case rate and minimize the worst-case packet-error probability (PEP) for eMBB and URLLC users, respectively, using effective power splitting and successive interference cancellation (SIC) decoding of the sub-messages. To solve the non-convexity of the formulated MOOP, we adopt a priori articulation scheme combined with the weighted product approach to transforming the MOOP into a single objective optimization problem (SOOP) and later, solve it using a low complex differential evolution (DE)-based meta-heuristic algorithm. We derive an optimal decoding strategy for sub-messages to ensure better user fairness among eMBB-URLLC traffic. Numerical simulations demonstrate the superiority of the considered RSMA-based superposition for hybrid eMBB-URLLC traffic over conventional slicing and superposition techniques. Moreover, the adopted weighted product method-based DE algorithm outperforms the state-of-art solutions.