A Rate-Splitting Strategy for Max-Min Fair Multigroup Multicasting

TL;DR

This paper introduces a rate-splitting strategy for multigroup multicasting that improves fairness and performance in overloaded systems by decoding and canceling interference, surpassing traditional beamforming methods.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel rate-splitting approach to mitigate inter-group interference in multigroup multicasting, especially in overloaded systems where traditional methods fail.

Findings

Rate-splitting achieves higher max-min fairness performance.

Significant gains over conventional beamforming in overloaded scenarios.

Interference decoding and cancellation enhance system robustness.

Abstract

We consider the problem of transmit beamforming to multiple cochannel multicast groups. The conventional approach is to beamform a designated data stream to each group, while treating potential inter-group interference as noise at the receivers. In overloaded systems where the number of transmit antennas is insufficient to perform interference nulling, we show that inter-group interference dominates at high SNRs, leading to a saturating max-min fair performance. We propose a rather unconventional approach to cope with this issue based on the concept of Rate-Splitting (RS). In particular, part of the interference is broadcasted to all groups such that it is decoded and canceled before the designated beams are decoded. We show that the RS strategy achieves significant performance gains over the conventional multigroup multicast beamforming strategy.