Robust Rate-Splitting and Beamforming for Ultra-Reliable and Low-Latency Communications

To provide satisfying services for ever-emerging mission-critical applications, the ultra-reliable and low-latency communications (URLLC) need novel design to improve the spectrum efficiency and enhance the robustness. To achieve this, we design a robust rate-splitting and beamforming scheme for the downlink multiuser URLLC system in finite blocklength regime under imperfect channel state information at the transmitter (CSIT) acquisition. Rate-splitting is utilized to deal with the complex inter-user interference and improve the spectrum efficiency. Considering the norm-bounded CSIT error model, we formulate a minimum user rate maximization problem to guarantee the URLLC performance requirements by jointly designing the rate-splitting factors and the common/private beamforming vectors. The corresponding constraints are infinite due to the uncertainty of CSIT and the constraint set is also non-convex. To tackle it, we convert the infinite constraints into finite ones utilizing S-Procedure, and transform the original problem into difference of convex (DC) programming. Efficient approaches based on constrained concave convex procedure and Gaussian randomization are proposed to solve the DC programming and generate initial feasible points. Through extensive simulations, the convergence, robustness and effectiveness proprieties of the design are investigated and confirmed. Compared with the baselines, our design can achieve obvious performance improvement for different blocklength and block error rate requirements.