Rate-Splitting Multiple Access for 6G Networks: Ten Promising Scenarios and Applications

TL;DR

This paper explores rate-splitting multiple access (RSMA) as a promising technique for 6G networks, highlighting its theoretical foundation, benefits, and ten potential applications to enhance interference management and spectral efficiency.

Contribution

The paper provides a comprehensive overview of RSMA, including its theoretical basis, advantages, and ten promising scenarios for 6G, advancing interference mitigation strategies.

Findings

RSMA offers significant spectral efficiency improvements.

RSMA enhances robustness and scalability in interference management.

RSMA enables ten innovative 6G applications.

Abstract

In the upcoming 6G era, multiple access (MA) will play an essential role in achieving high throughput performances required in a wide range of wireless applications. Since MA and interference management are closely related issues, the conventional MA techniques are limited in that they cannot provide near-optimal performance in universal interference regimes. Recently, rate-splitting multiple access (RSMA) has been gaining much attention. RSMA splits an individual message into two parts: a common part, decodable by every user, and a private part, decodable only by the intended user. Each user first decodes the common message and then decodes its private message by applying successive interference cancellation (SIC). By doing so, RSMA not only embraces the existing MA techniques as special cases but also provides significant performance gains by efficiently mitigating inter-user interference in a broad range of interference regimes. In this article, we first present the theoretical foundation of RSMA. Subsequently, we put forth four key benefits of RSMA: spectral efficiency, robustness, scalability, and flexibility. Upon this, we describe how RSMA can enable ten promising scenarios and applications along with future research directions to pave the way for 6G.