Joint Beam Scheduling and Resource Allocation for Flexible RSMA-aided Near-Field Communications
Jiasi Zhou, Cong Zhou, Yijie Mao, Chintha Tellambura
TL;DR
This work addresses maximizing throughput in near-field networks by reusing preconfigured beams to support additional NF/FF users while preserving legacy NF rates. It introduces a flexible RSMA scheme with selective common-stream decoding and jointly optimizes beam scheduling, power allocation, common-rate allocation, and RS-user selection. The problem is decomposed into three subproblems and solved via an accelerated bisection search, quadratic-transform surrogates, and simulated annealing, yielding significant gains over traditional baselines. The results highlight the effectiveness of combining RSMA with beam-aware scheduling to enhance spectral efficiency and connectivity in NF scenarios, with practical implications for future high-density, high-frequency networks.
Abstract
Supporting immense throughput and ubiquitous connectivity holds paramount importance for future wireless networks. To this end, this letter focuses on how the spatial beams configured for legacy near-field (NF) users can be leveraged to serve extra NF or far-field users while ensuring the rate requirements of legacy NF users. In particular, a flexible rate splitting multiple access (RSMA) scheme is proposed to efficiently manage interference, which carefully selects a subset of legacy users to decode the common stream. Beam scheduling, power allocation, common rate allocation, and user selection are jointly optimized to maximize the sum rate of additional users. To solve the formulated discrete non-convex problem, it is split into three subproblems. The accelerated bisection searching, quadratic transform, and simulated annealing approaches are developed to attack them. Simulation results reveal that the proposed transmit scheme and algorithm achieve significant gains over three competing benchmarks.