Next Generation Multiple Access for IMT Towards 2030 and Beyond

Multiple access techniques are fundamental to the design of wireless communication systems, since many crucial components of such systems depend on the choice of the multiple access technique. Because of the importance of multiple access, there has been an ongoing quest during the past decade to develop next generation multiple access (NGMA). Among those potential candidates for NGMA, non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) has received significant attention from both the industrial and academic research communities, and has been highlighted in the recently published International Mobile Telecommunications (IMT)-2030 Framework. However, there is still no consensus in the research community about how exactly NOMA assisted NGMA should be designed. This perspective is to outline three important features of NOMA assisted NGMA, namely multi-domain utilization, multi-mode compatibility, and multi-dimensional optimality, where important directions for future research into the design of NOMA assisted NGMA are also discussed.