Flexible resource allocation for multicast in OFDMA based wireless networks

This paper studies an efficient resource allocation scheme for multicast in OFDMA based wireless networks. Apart from the conventional resource allocation schemes for multicast which allocate exactly the same subcarriers to the users in a multicast group, this paper proposes a more flexible scheme to divide the multicast group members into different subgroups by utilising the diversity of channel coefficient of different users. We first formulate an optimisation problem to maximise the overall transmission rate. Given the NP-hardness of the problem, we design a low-complexity heuristic, Flexible Resource Allocation with Geometric programming (FRAG). FRAG is a two-step heuristic to subdivide the multicast groups and allocate resource to corresponding subgroups. In the first step, we propose a greedy algorithm to subdivide groups and allocate subcarriers given the assumption of even power distribution. Then we use geometric programming (GP) to solve the optimal power allocation problem. Numerical results show that FRAG is able to allocate subcarriers and power efficiently and effectively, and it achieves up to 33% improvement in aggregated throughput.