Venue: Webinar link will be emailed to registrants

Title: Rate-Splitting Multiple Access for 6G: Principles, Applications, and Opportunities

Presenter: Prof Bruno Clerckx, Imperial College London, UK

Abstract: This talk argues that to efficiently cope with the high throughput, reliability, heterogeneity of Quality-of-Service (QoS), massive connectivity requirements, and new emerging services of future 6G multi-antenna wireless networks, multiple access and multiuser communication system design need to depart from the two extreme interference management strategies, namely fully treat interference as noise (as commonly used in 5G, MU-MIMO, CoMP, Massive MIMO, millimetre wave MIMO) and fully decode interference (as in NOMA). To that end, I will introduce the audience to a novel, general and powerful multiple access framework called Rate-Splitting Multiple Access (RSMA) for multi-antenna networks. RSMA is based on multi-antenna Rate-Splitting (RS) at the transmitter and successive interference cancellation (SIC) at the receivers. RSMA relies on the split of messages and the non-orthogonal transmission of common messages decoded by multiple users, and private messages decoded by their corresponding users. 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 in a wide range of network loads and user deployments, robustness against imperfect Channel State Information at the Transmitter (CSIT), as well as feedback overhead and complexity reduction. RSMA provides a powerful framework for the design and optimization of non-orthogonal transmission, multiple access, and interference management strategies in future MIMO wireless networks. Thanks to its versatility, RS has the potential to tackle challenges of modern communication systems and is a gold mine of research problems for academia and industry, spanning fundamental limits, optimization, PHY and MAC layers, and standardization.

This talk will share key principles of RSMA, recent developments, and emerging applications and opportunities of RSMA for beyond 5G networks.

Bio: Bruno Clerckx is Professor of Wireless Communications and Signal Processing, the Head of the Wireless Communications and Signal Processing Lab, and the Deputy Head of the Communications and Signal Processing Group, within the Electrical and Electronic Engineering Department, Imperial College London, U.K. He received the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium, in 2000 and 2005, respectively. From 2006 to 2011, he was with Samsung Electronics, South Korea, where he actively contributed to 4G (3GPP LTE/LTE-A and IEEE 802.16m) and acted as the Rapporteur for the 3GPP Coordinated Multi-Point (CoMP) Study Item. Since 2011, he has been with Imperial College London, first as a Lecturer from 2011 to 2015, Senior Lecturer from 2015 to 2017, Reader from 2017 to 2020, and now as Professor. From 2014 to 2016, he also was an Associate Professor with Korea University, Seoul, South Korea. He has authored two books, 190 peer-reviewed international research papers, and 150 standards contributions, and is the inventor of 80 issued or pending patents among which 15 have been adopted in the specifications of 4G standards and are used by billions of devices worldwide. His research area is communication theory and signal processing for wireless networks. He has been a TPC member, a symposium chair, or a TPC chair of many symposia on communication theory, signal processing for communication and wireless communication for several leading international IEEE conferences. He was an Elected Member of the IEEE Signal Processing Society SPCOM (Signal Processing for Communications and Networking) Technical Committee. He served as an Editor for the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMMUNICATIONS, the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS, and the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SIGNAL PROCESSING. He has also been a (lead) guest editor for special issues of the EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking, IEEE ACCESS, the IEEE JOURNAL ON SELECTED AREAS IN COMMUNICATIONS and the IEEE JOURNAL OF SELECTED TOPICS IN SIGNAL PROCESSING. He was an Editor for the 3GPP LTE-Advanced Standard Technical Report on CoMP.