Performance of Rate Splitting Multiple Access-based Visible Light Communications with Residual Interference and Channel Estimation Errors

Abstract

Rate splitting multiple access (RSMA) is a powerful and upcoming multiple access technique that can serve as a promising technology for 5G and beyond applications. Due to the increase in the number of indoor communication devices, the internet of everything (IoE) demands higher bandwidth. Visible light communication (VLC) would be a viable solution for an indoor environment that offers high bandwidth, cost-free spectrum, and low power, and if employed with RSMA, the sum rate can be maximized. In this paper, we derive the closedform outage probability (OP) for the downlink RSMA-based VLC scheme over Rayleigh and Rician channels. We perform outage analyses for perfect as well as imperfect channel state information (CSI) and successive interference cancellation (SIC), respectively to study the system characteristics. Also, we show the superiority of RSMA over non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) for VLC-based system in terms of OP over Rayleigh and Rician channels. From the simulations, we show that the RSMA-based VLC system outperforms conventional NOMAbased VLC and the quality of services improves with the line of sight communication i.e., the Rician fading channel.