Wireless Multicasting for Content Distribution: Stability and Delay Gain Analysis

In this work, we provide a comprehensive analysis of stability properties and delay gains that wireless multicasting capabilities, as opposed to more traditional unicast transmissions, can provide for content distribution in mobile networks. In particular, we propose a model and characterize the average queue-length (and hence average delay) performance of unicasting and various multicasting strategies for serving a dynamic user population at the wireless edge. First, we show that optimized static randomized multicasting (we call it `blind multicasting') leads to stable-everywhere operation irrespective of the network loading factor (given by the ratio of the demand rate to the service rate) and the content popularity distribution. In contrast, traditional unicasting suffers from unstable operation when the loading factor approaches one, although it outperforms blind multicasting at small loading factor levels. This motivates us to study `work-conserving multicast' policies next that always outperform unicasting while still offering stable-everywhere operation. Then, in the worst-case of uniformly-distributed content popularity, we explicitly characterize the scaling of the average queue-length (and hence delay) under a first-come-first-serve multicast strategy as a function of the database size and the loading factor. Consequently, this work provides the fundamental limits, as well as the guidelines, for the design and performance analysis of efficient multicasting strategies for wireless content distribution.