Rate-splitting multiple access (RSMA) has emerged as a novel, general, and powerful framework for the design and optimization of non-orthogonal transmission, multiple access (MA), and interference management strategies for future wireless networks. By exploiting splitting of user messages as well as non-orthogonal transmission of common messages decoded by multiple users and private messages decoded by their corresponding users, RSMA can softly bridge and therefore reconcile the two extreme interference management strategies of fully decoding interference and treating interference as noise. RSMA has been shown to generalize and subsume as special cases four existing MA schemes, namely, orthogonal multiple access (OMA), physical-layer multicasting, space division multiple access (SDMA) based on linear precoding (currently used in the fifth generation wireless network–5G), and non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) based on linearly precoded superposition coding with successive interference cancellation (SIC). Through information and communication theoretic analysis, RSMA has been shown to be optimal (from a Degrees-of-Freedom region perspective) in several transmission scenarios. Compared to the conventional MA strategies used in 5G, RSMA enables spectral efficiency (SE), energy efficiency (EE), coverage, user fairness, reliability, and quality of service (QoS) enhancements for a wide range of network loads (including both underloaded and overloaded regimes) and user channel conditions. Furthermore, it enjoys a higher robustness against imperfect channel state information at the transmitter (CSIT) and entails lower feedback overhead and complexity. Despite its great potential to fundamentally change the physical (PHY) layer and media access control (MAC) layer of wireless communication networks, RSMA is still confronted with many challenges on the road towards standardization. In this paper, we present the first comprehensive tutorial on RSMA by providing a survey of the pertinent state-of-the-art research, detailing its architecture, taxonomy, and various appealing applications, as well as comparing with existing MA schemes in terms of their overall frameworks, performance, and complexities. An in-depth discussion of future RSMA research challenges is also provided to inspire future research on RSMA-aided wireless communication for beyond 5G systems.

Space-division multiple access (SDMA) utilizes linear precoding to separate users in the spatial domain and relies on fully treating any residual multi-user interference as noise. Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) uses linearly precoded superposition coding with successive interference cancellation (SIC) to superpose users in the power domain and relies on user grouping and ordering to enforce some users to fully decode and cancel interference created by other users. In this paper, we argue that to efficiently cope with the high throughput, heterogeneity of quality of service (QoS), and massive connectivity requirements of future multi-antenna wireless networks, multiple access design needs to depart from those two extreme interference management strategies, namely fully treat interference as noise (as in SDMA) and fully decode interference (as in NOMA). Considering a multiple-input single-output broadcast channel, we develop a novel multiple access framework, called rate-splitting multiple access (RSMA). RSMA is a more general and more powerful multiple access for downlink multi-antenna systems that contains SDMA and NOMA as special cases. RSMA relies on linearly precoded rate-splitting with SIC to decode part of the interference and treat the remaining part of the interference as noise. This capability of RSMA to partially decode interference and partially treat interference as noise enables to softly bridge the two extremes of fully decoding interference and treating interference as noise and provides room for rate and QoS enhancements and complexity reduction. The three multiple access schemes are compared, and extensive numerical results show that RSMA provides a smooth transition between SDMA and NOMA and outperforms them both in a wide range of network loads (underloaded and overloaded regimes) and user deployments (with a diversity of channel directions, channel strengths, and qualities of channel state information at the transmitter). Moreover, RSMA provides rate and QoS enhancements over NOMA at a lower computational complexity for the transmit scheduler and the receivers (number of SIC layers).

Rate-Splitting Multiple Access (RSMA) has emerged as a powerful multiple access, interference management, and multi-user strategy for next generation communication systems. In this tutorial, we depart from the orthogonal multiple access (OMA) versus non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) discussion held in 5G, and the conventional multi-user linear precoding approach used in space-division multiple access (SDMA), multi-user and massive MIMO in 4G and 5G, and show how multi-user communications and multiple access design for 6G and beyond should be intimately related to the fundamental problem of interference management. We start from foundational principles of interference management and rate-splitting, and progressively delineate RSMA frameworks for downlink, uplink, and multi-cell networks. We show that, in contrast to past generations of multiple access techniques (OMA, NOMA, SDMA), RSMA offers numerous benefits: 1) enhanced spectral, energy and computation efficiency; 2) universality by unifying and generalizing OMA, SDMA, NOMA, physical-layer multicasting, multi-user MIMO under a single framework that holds for any number of antennas at each node (SISO, SIMO, MISO, and MIMO settings); 3) flexibility by coping with any interference levels (from very weak to very strong), network loads (underloaded, overloaded), services (unicast, multicast), traffic, user deployments (channel directions and strengths); 4) robustness to inaccurate channel state information (CSI) and resilience to mixed-critical quality of service; 5) reliability under short channel codes and low latency. We then discuss how those benefits translate into numerous opportunities for RSMA in over forty different applications and scenarios of 6G, e.g., multi-user MIMO with statistical/quantized CSI, FDD/TDD/cell-free massive MIMO, millimeter wave and terahertz, cooperative relaying, physical layer security, reconfigurable intelligent surfaces, cloud-radio access network, internet-of-things, massive access, joint communication and jamming, non-orthogonal unicast and multicast, multigroup multicast, multibeam satellite, space-air-ground integrated networks, unmanned aerial vehicles, integrated sensing and communications, grant-free access, network slicing, cognitive radio, optical/visible light communications, mobile edge computing, machine/federated learning, etc. We finally address common myths and answer frequently asked questions, opening the discussions to interesting future research avenues. Supported by the numerous benefits and applications, the tutorial concludes on the underpinning role played by RSMA in next generation networks, which should inspire future research, development, and standardization of RSMA-aided communication for 6G.

Considering a two-user multi-antenna Broadcast Channel, this paper shows that linearly precoded Rate-Splitting (RS) with Successive Interference Cancellation (SIC) receivers is a flexible framework for non-orthogonal transmission that generalizes, and subsumes as special cases, four seemingly different strategies, namely Space Division Multiple Access (SDMA) based on linear precoding, Orthogonal Multiple Access (OMA), Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) based on linearly precoded superposition coding with SIC, and physical-layer multicasting. The paper studies the sum-rate and shows analytically how RS unifies, outperforms, and specializes to SDMA, OMA, NOMA, and multicasting as a function of the disparity of the channel strengths and the angle between the user channel directions.

In a Non-Orthogonal Unicast and Multicast (NOUM) transmission system, a multicast stream intended to all the receivers is superimposed in the power domain on the unicast streams. One layer of Successive Interference Cancellation (SIC) is required at each receiver to remove the multicast stream before decoding its intended unicast stream. In this paper, we first show that a linearly-precoded 1-layer Rate-Splitting (RS) strategy at the transmitter can efficiently exploit this existing SIC receiver architecture. By splitting the unicast messages into common and private parts and encoding the common parts along with the multicast message into a super-common stream decoded by all users, the SIC is better reused for the dual purpose of separating the unicast and multicast streams as well as better managing the multi-user interference among the unicast streams. We further propose multi-layer transmission strategies based on the generalized RS and power-domain Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA). Two different objectives are studied for the design of the precoders, namely, maximizing the Weighted Sum Rate (WSR) of the unicast messages and maximizing the system Energy Efficiency (EE), both subject to Quality of Service (QoS) rate requirements of all messages and a sum power constraint. A Weighted Minimum Mean Square Error (WMMSE)-based algorithm and a Successive Convex Approximation (SCA)-based algorithm are proposed to solve the WSR and EE problems, respectively. Numerical results show that the proposed RS-assisted NOUM transmission strategies are more spectrally and energy efficient than the conventional Multi-User Linear-Precoding (MU-LP), Orthogonal Multiple Access (OMA) and power-domain NOMA in a wide range of user deployments (with a diversity of channel directions, channel strengths and qualities of channel state information at the transmitter) and network loads (underloaded and overloaded regimes). It is superior for the downlink multi-antenna NOUM transmission.

In the past few years, a large body of literature has been created on downlink Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA), employing superposition coding and Successive Interference Cancellation (SIC), in multi-antenna wireless networks. Furthermore, the benefits of NOMA over Orthogonal Multiple Access (OMA) have been highlighted. In this paper, we take a critical and fresh look at the downlink Next Generation Multiple Access (NGMA) literature. Instead of contrasting NOMA with OMA, we contrast NOMA with two other multiple access baselines. The first is conventional Multi-User Linear Precoding (MU-LP), as used in Space-Division Multiple Access (SDMA) and multi-user Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) in 4G and 5G. The second, called Rate-Splitting Multiple Access (RSMA), is based on multi-antenna Rate-Splitting (RS). It is also a non-orthogonal transmission strategy relying on SIC developed in the past few years in parallel and independently from NOMA. We show that there is some confusion about the benefits of NOMA, and we dispel the associated misconceptions. First, we highlight why NOMA is inefficient in multi-antenna settings based on basic multiplexing gain analysis. We stress that the issue lies in how the NOMA literature, originally developed for single-antenna setups, has been hastily applied to multi-antenna setups, resulting in a misuse of spatial dimensions and therefore loss in multiplexing gains and rate. Second, we show that NOMA incurs a severe multiplexing gain loss despite an increased receiver complexity due to an inefficient use of SIC receivers. Third, we emphasize that much of the merits of NOMA are due to the constant comparison to OMA instead of comparing it to MU-LP and RS baselines. We then expose the pivotal design constraint that multi-antenna NOMA requires one user to fully decode the messages of the other users. This design constraint is responsible for the multiplexing gain erosion, rate and spectral efficiency loss, ineffectiveness to serve a large number of users, and inefficient use of SIC receivers in multi-antenna settings. Our analysis and simulation results confirm that NOMA should not be applied blindly to multi-antenna settings, highlight the scenarios where MU-LP outperforms NOMA and vice versa, and demonstrate the inefficiency, performance loss, and complexity disadvantages of NOMA compared to RSMA. The first takeaway message is that, while NOMA is suited for single-antenna settings (as originally intended), it is not efficient in most multi-antenna deployments. The second takeaway message is that another non-orthogonal transmission framework, based on RSMA, exists which fully exploits the multiplexing gain and the benefits of SIC to boost the rate and the number of users to serve in multi-antenna settings and outperforms both NOMA and MU-LP. Indeed, RSMA achieves higher multiplexing gains and rates, serves a larger number of users, is more robust to user deployments, network loads and inaccurate channel state information and has a lower receiver complexity than NOMA. Consequently, RSMA is a promising technology for NGMA and future networks such as 6G and beyond.