Rate-Splitting Multiple Access for Non-Orthogonal Unicast Multicast: An Experimental Study

Non-orthogonal unicast multicast (NOUM) is a variant of multi-antenna multi-user communications where the users desire a shared message (multicast) in addition to their respective unique messages (unicast). The multicast rate is capped in many emerging NOUM applications, such as live-event broadcasting, location-based services and vehicular communications. Given this constraint, we experimentally show that when the user channels are highly correlated, Rate-Splitting Multiple Access (RSMA)-based NOUM can meet the multicast rate while supporting a larger unicast sum rate than conventional multi-user linear precoding (MULP)-based NOUM.