  Rate-splitting multiple access (RSMA), relying on linearly precoded
rate-splitting (RS) at the transmitter and successive interference cancellation
(SIC) at the receivers has emerged as a powerful and flexible multiple access
strategy for downlink multi-user multi-antenna systems. Through message
splitting and the transmission of both common and private messages, RSMA has
been demonstrated to be a robust interference management strategy which enables
partially decoding interference and partially treating interference as noise.
In this work, we consider the application of RSMA in a multigroup multicast
scenario, where each message is intended to a group of users. By leveraging the
recent results on the max-min fair (MMF) optimization problem of RSMA-based
multigroup multicast beamforming with imperfect channel state information at
the transmitter (CSIT), we investigate the design of the physical (PHY) layer
including finite length polar coding, finite alphabet modulation, adaptive
modulation and coding (AMC) algorithm, and SIC receivers, etc. Link-level
simulation (LLS) results verify the superiority of RSMA-based multigroup
multicast transmission compared with space-division multiple access
(SDMA)-based strategy in both cellular systems and multibeam satellite systems.
