Dual-Polarized Massive MIMO-RSMA Networks: Tackling Imperfect SIC

The polarization domain provides an extra degree of freedom (DoF) for improving the performance of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. This paper takes advantage of this additional DoF to alleviate practical issues of successive interference cancellation (SIC) in rate-splitting multiple access (RSMA) schemes. Specifically, we propose three dual-polarized downlink transmission approaches for a massive MIMO-RSMA network under the effects of polarization interference and residual errors of imperfect SIC. The first approach implements polarization multiplexing for transmitting the users' data messages, which removes the need to execute SIC in the reception. The second approach transmits replicas of users' messages in the two polarizations, which enables users to exploit diversity through the polarization domain. The third approach, in its turn, employs the original SIC-based RSMA technique per polarization, and this allows the BS to transmit two independent superimposed data streams simultaneously. An in-depth theoretical analysis is carried out, in which we derive tight closed-form approximations for the outage probabilities of the three proposed approaches. Accurate approximations for the ergodic sum-rates of the two first schemes are also derived. Simulation results validate the theoretical analysis and confirm the effectiveness of the proposed schemes. For instance, under low to moderate cross-polar interference, the results show that, even under high levels of residual SIC error, our dual-polarized MIMO-RSMA strategies outperform the conventional single-polarized MIMO-RSMA counterpart. It is also shown that the performance of all RSMA schemes is impressively higher than that of single and dual-polarized massive MIMO systems employing non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) and orthogonal multiple access (OMA) techniques.