  Next-generation wireless networks are projected to empower a broad range of
Internet-of-things (IoT) applications and services with extreme data rates,
posing new challenges in delivering large-scale connectivity at a low cost to
current communication paradigms. Rate-splitting multiple access (RSMA) is one
of the most spotlight nominees, conceived to address spectrum scarcity while
reaching massive connectivity. Meanwhile, symbiotic communication is said to be
an inexpensive way to realize future IoT on a large scale. To reach the goal of
spectrum efficiency improvement and low energy consumption, we merge these
advances by means of introducing a novel paradigm shift, called symbiotic
backscatter RSMA, for the next generation. Specifically, we first establish the
way to operate the symbiotic system to assist the readers in apprehending the
proposed paradigm, then guide detailed design in beamforming weights with four
potential gain-control (GC) strategies for enhancing symbiotic communication,
and finally provide an information-theoretic framework using a new metric,
called symbiotic outage probability (SOP) to characterize the proposed system
performance. Through numerical result experiments, we show that the developed
framework can accurately predict the actual SOP and the efficacy of the
proposed GC strategies in improving the SOP performance.
