  Recently, interest on the utilization of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has
aroused. Specifically, UAVs can be used in cellular networks as aerial users
for delivery, surveillance, rescue search, or as an aerial base station (aBS)
for communication with ground users in remote uncovered areas or in dense
environments requiring prompt high capacity. Aiming to satisfy the high
requirements of wireless aerial networks, several multiple access techniques
have been investigated. In particular, space-division multiple access(SDMA) and
power-domain non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) present promising
multiplexing gains for aerial downlink and uplink. Nevertheless, these gains
are limited as they depend on the conditions of the environment. Hence, a
generalized scheme has been recently proposed, called rate-splitting multiple
access (RSMA), which is capable of achieving better spectral efficiency gains
compared to SDMA and NOMA. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of
key multiple access technologies adopted for aerial networks, where aBSs are
deployed to serve ground users. Since there have been only sporadic results
reported on the use of RSMA in aerial systems, we aim to extend the discussion
on this topic by modelling and analyzing the weighted sum-rate performance of a
two-user downlink network served by an RSMA-based aBS. Finally, related open
issues and future research directions are exposed.
