Joint Receive and Passive Beamforming Optimization for RIS-Assisted Uplink RSMA Systems

In this letter, we investigate the joint optimization of transmit power allocation and receive/passive beamforming in a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-assisted uplink two-user rate-splitting multiple access (RSMA) system. Aiming at maximizing the achievable rate of one user subject to another user’s quality of service (QoS) requirements, RIS is deployed to assist the uplink transmissions from both users to a multi-antenna base station (BS). We decouple the non-convex rate maximization problem into three sub-problems and propose an alternating optimization (AO) algorithm to optimize the receive/passive beamforming and transmit power allocation. A closed-form expression is derived for the sub-problem of transmit power allocation by using the optimal decoding order and the concave-convex fractional programming beamforming problems are converted to convex ones by using the Charnes-Cooper transform. Then, a penalty term approach is applied to effectively solve the rank-1 constrained beamforming subproblems. Simulation results verify that the proposed AO algorithm attains a higher achievable rate than the existing benchmark schemes.