Tradeoff between Energy-Efficiency and Spectral-Efficiency by Cooperative Rate Splitting

The trend of an increasing demand for a high-quality user experience, coupled with a shortage of radio resources, has necessitated more advanced wireless techniques to cooperatively achieve the required quality-of-experience enhancement. In this study, we investigate the critical problem of rate splitting in heterogeneous cellular networks, where concurrent transmission, for instance, the coordinated multipoint transmission and reception of LTE-A systems, shows promise for improvement of network-wide capacity and the user experience. Unlike most current studies, which only deal with spectral efficiency enhancement, we implement an optimal rate splitting strategy to improve both spectral efficiency and energy efficiency by exploring and exploiting cooperation diversity. First, we introduce the motivation for our proposed algorithm, and then employ the typical cooperative bargaining game to formulate the problem. Next, we derive the best response function by analyzing the dual problem of the defined primal problem. The existence and uniqueness of the proposed cooperative bargaining equilibrium are proved, and more importantly, a distributed algorithm is designed to approach the optimal unique solution under mild conditions. Finally, numerical results show a performance improvement for our proposed distributed cooperative rate splitting algorithm.