  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.
