Rate-Splitting Multiple Access: The First Prototype and Experimental Validation of its Superiority over SDMA and NOMA

In multi-user multi-antenna communications, it is well-known in theory that Rate-Splitting Multiple Access (RSMA) can achieve a higher spectral efficiency than both Space Division Multiple Access (SDMA) and Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA). However, an experimental evaluation of RSMA’s performance, relative to SDMA and NOMA, is missing in the literature, which is essential to address the ongoing debate between RSMA, SDMA and NOMA over which is better suited to handle most efficiently the available resources and interference in 6G. In this paper, we address this critical knowledge gap by realizing the first-ever RSMA prototype using software-defined radios. Through measurements using our prototype, we empirically solve the modulation and coding scheme-limited sum throughput maximization problem for RSMA, SDMA and NOMA for the two-user multiple-input single-output (MISO) scenario over (a) different pairs of line-of-sight channels that vary in terms of their relative pathloss and spatial correlation, and with (b) different channel state information quality. We observe that RSMA achieves the highest sum throughput across all these cases, whereas SDMA and NOMA are effective only in some cases. Furthermore, RSMA also achieves better fairness at a higher sum throughput than both SDMA and NOMA. These empirical results are consistent with theoretical predictions.