Outage Probability and Throughput Analysis of Rate-Splitting Multiple Access for Power Line Communications

Power line communication (PLC) suffers from channel impairments, among which impulsive noise is a major challenge impacting communication performance. In this letter, we incorporate rate splitting multiple access (RSMA) into PLC to ensure robustness, leveraging RSMA’s ability to mitigate channel impairments. We derive analytical expressions for the outage probability (OP) and throughput. We optimize the power and target rate allocation to minimize the system OP. The proposed algorithm significantly reduces the OP. An analysis of the OP-throughput trade-off as a function of target rate shows that RSMA-PLC achieves higher throughput while maintaining lower OP.