Rate-Splitting Multiple Access for Satellite Short-Packet Communications: Finite Blocklength Modeling and Reliability Analysis

Nguyen, Sang-Quang and Le, Chi-Bao (2026) Rate-Splitting Multiple Access for Satellite Short-Packet Communications: Finite Blocklength Modeling and Reliability Analysis. INFOCOMMUNICATIONS JOURNAL, 18 (1). pp. 71-78. ISSN 2061-2079

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Abstract

Short-packet transmission is becoming crucial for satellite services that cannot rely on long codewords to hit the required latency and reliability. This study investigates ratesplitting multiple access (RSMA) in that context and builds a finite-blocklength (FBL) model for a downlink satellite-terrestrial link affected by Shadowed-Rician fading. We obtain closed-form approximations for the block error rate (BLER) of both the common and private streams, explicitly incorporating imperfect successive interference cancellation (ipSIC) at the receivers. Compared with power-domain non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA), RSMA exhibits more stable BLER the common stream helps dampen residual interference due to ipSIC and the short-packet effect–so RSMA generally needs less transmit power to attain the same error targets. Numerical results validate the analysis and demonstrate consistent RSMA advantages across a wide range of transmit powers, blocklengths, shadowing severities, and antenna configurations. The results suggest that RSMA is a very promising option for future satellite systems that need to provide reliable, low-latency, and short-packet communications in view of realistic SIC imperfections.

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