The reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) and rate-splitting multiple access (RSMA) are considered as promising technologies for the beyond Fifth-Generation (B5G) and Sixth-Generation (6G) wireless systems by controlling the propagation environment, which attenuates the transmitted signal, and by managing the interference by splitting the user message into common and private messages. Because conventional RIS elements have each impedance connected to the ground, the sum-rate performance improvement of the RIS is limited. Therefore, the new RISs, which have impedance elements connected to each other, have been proposed recently. To be more adaptive to each channel, the optimization of the grouping of the RIS elements is required. Furthermore, since the solution of the optimal rate-splitting (RS) power-splitting ratio is complex, the value should be simply optimized to be more practical in the wireless system. In this paper, the grouping scheme of the RIS elements according to the user scheduling and the solution of the RS power-splitting ratio based on fractional programming (FP) are proposed. The simulation results showed that the proposed RIS-assisted RSMA system achieved a high sum-rate performance compared to the conventional RIS-assisted spatial-division multiple access (SDMA) system. Therefore, the proposed scheme can perform adaptively for the channel and has a flexible interference management. Furthermore, it can be a more suitable technique for B5G and 6G.
Keywords: MIMO; mmWave; rate-splitting multiple access; reconfigurable intelligent surface.