MIMO processing plays a central part towards the recent increase in spectral and energy efficiencies of wireless networks. MIMO has grown beyond the original point-to-point channel and nowadays refers to a diverse range of centralized and distributed deployments. The fundamental bottleneck towards enormous spectral and energy efficiency benefits in multiuser MIMO networks lies in a huge demand for accurate channel state information at the transmitter (CSIT). This has become increasingly difficult to satisfy due to the increasing number of antennas and access points in next generation wireless networks relying on dense heterogeneous networks and transmitters equipped with a large number of antennas. CSIT inaccuracy results in a multi-user interference problem that is the primary bottleneck of MIMO wireless networks. Looking backward, the problem has been to strive to apply techniques designed for perfect CSIT to scenarios with imperfect CSIT. In this paper, we depart from this conventional approach and introduce the readers to a promising strategy based on rate-splitting. Rate-splitting relies on the transmission of common and private messages and is shown to provide significant benefits in terms of spectral and energy efficiencies, reliability and CSI feedback overhead reduction over conventional strategies used in LTE-A and exclusively relying on private message transmissions. Open problems, impact on standard specifications and operational challenges are also discussed. Promising approaches for 5G consist in densifying the network by adding more antennas in a distributed or co-localized manner. A distributed deployment leads to dense homogeneous/heterogeneous networks where the widely recognized bottleneck is interference. Interference management relying on multi-point cooperation have drawn a lot of attention in industry (i.e. CoMP in LTE-A [1]) and academia. Co-localized deployment leads to massive MIMO (i.e. FD-MIMO in LTE-A). Although appealing in their concept, those aforementioned MIMO techniques are hampered by several practical factors. Among these, the acquisition of accurate CSI knowledge at the transmitter (CSIT) is the major challenge. The availability of accurate CSIT is crucial for Downlink (DL) multi-user MIMO wireless networks. The beamforming and interference nulling performance heavily depends on the channel estimation accuracy. Unfortunately, pilot reuse tends to impair channel estimation in TDD and a significant feedback overhead is required to guarantee sufficient feedback accuracy in FDD due to the large number of antennas. Delay and inaccurate calibrations of the RF chains also contribute to making the CSIT inaccurate. CSIT inaccuracy results in a multi-user interference and link adaptation problem that is the primary bottleneck of MIMO wireless networks, as highlighted e.g. in [2] for for CoMP. Looking backward, the problem has been to strive to apply techniques designed for perfect CSIT to scenarios with imperfect CSIT. Following the same path will only increase the gap between theory and practice as the density of antennas increases. The motivation behind this paper is the following: would it not be wiser to design wireless networks from scratch accounting for imperfect CSIT and its resulting multi-user interference? Interestingly, there has been some recent communication and information theoretic progress in understanding the fundamental impact of imperfect CSIT and resulting multi-user interference on the performance (measured in terms of degree of freedom) of wireless networks. Results highlight that to benefit from imperfect CSIT and tackle the multi-user
It has been studied as a promising strategy for robust transmission with imperfect CSI at the transmitter REF .
Rate Splitting for MIMO Wireless Networks: A Promising PHY-Layer Strategy for LTE Evolution
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