A Hybrid Unicast-Multicast Network Selection for Video Deliveries in Dense Heterogeneous Network Environments

Resource management in emerging dense heterogeneous network environments (DenseNets) is a challenging issue. The employment of multicast transmissions in this scenario has potential to address the problems. On one hand, the large number of smart user mobile devices and user expectations for high-quality rich media services has determined a growing demand for network resources; in DenseNets, mobile users have to make the choice in terms of the network to connect to, in order to balance energy saving and delivery performance. On the other hand, the proliferation of user accesses to the existing and future network infrastructure will bring along with it the operators need for optimizing the radio resource usage. This paper proposes a hybrid unicast-multicast utility-based network selection algorithm (HUMANS), which offers the additional option of selecting multicast transmissions in the network selection process during video delivery. By serving users with good channel conditions via unicast transmissions and users with poor channel quality conditions via multicast, HUMANS allows outperforming other solutions in terms of outage percentage and average quality of transmission, in both low- and high-density scenarios. Most importantly, at the same time it guarantees operators a more efficient resource utilization.