  In order to efficiently cope with the high throughput, reliability,
heterogeneity of Quality-of-Service (QoS), and massive connectivity
requirements of future 6G multi-antenna wireless networks, multiple access and
multiuser communication system design need to depart from conventional
interference management strategies, namely fully treat interference as noise
(as commonly used in 4G/5G, MU-MIMO, CoMP, Massive MIMO, millimetre wave MIMO)
and fully decode interference (as in Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access, NOMA).
This paper is dedicated to the theory and applications of a more general and
powerful transmission framework based on Rate-Splitting Multiple Access (RSMA)
that splits messages into common and private parts and enables to partially
decode interference and treat remaining part of the interference as noise. This
enables RSMA to softly bridge and therefore reconcile the two extreme
strategies of fully decode interference and treat interference as noise and
provide room for spectral efficiency, energy efficiency and QoS enhancements,
robustness to imperfect Channel State Information at the Transmitter (CSIT),
and complexity reduction. We give an overview of RSMA and its potential to
address the requirements of 6G. This paper provides an overview of RSMA and its
potential to address the requirements of 6G.
