Is Downlink Training Necessary for User-Centric Cell-Free RSMA Systems With Mobile Users?

We study the spectral efficiency (SE) of a ratesplitting multiple access (RSMA) enabled multi-clustered cell-free (CF) massive multiple-input multiple-output (mMIMO) system. The access points (APs) in each cluster serve mobile user equipments (UEs) by employing RSMA. The UEs employ successive interference cancellation to decode their data. This work emphasizes the role of downlink (DL) pilots in realizing RSMA benefits in practical CF systems with spatially-correlated Rician channels which observe random phase shifts, pilot contamination, and channel aging due to UE mobility. We numerically show that DL pilots are required for RSMA in user-centric CF mMIMO systems with channel aging to outperform spatial division multiple access. We show that the degraded channel quality due to higher UE velocity and longer resource block lengths significantly reduces the RSMA SE. Increasing the number of clusters can compensate for the SE loss.