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.

翻译：在即将到来的6G时代，多址接入（MA）将在实现广泛无线应用所需的高吞吐量性能方面发挥关键作用。由于MA与干扰管理密切相关，传统MA技术在通用干扰场景下难以提供接近最优的性能。近年来，速率分割多址接入（RSMA）备受关注。RSMA将每个用户消息分割为两部分：所有用户可解码的公共部分，以及仅目标用户可解码的私有部分。每个用户先解码公共消息，再通过串行干扰消除（SIC）解码其私有消息。由此，RSMA不仅将现有MA技术作为特例纳入框架，还能通过有效缓解广泛干扰场景中的用户间干扰实现显著性能增益。本文首先阐述RSMA的理论基础，进而提出其四大核心优势：频谱效率、鲁棒性、可扩展性与灵活性。基于此，我们描述了RSMA如何赋能十大前景场景与应用，并指出了为6G铺平道路的未来研究方向。