Utility-Based User Grouping and Bandwidth Allocation for Wireless Multicast Systems

With the proliferation of wireless multimedia applications, multicast/broadcast has been recognized as an efficient technique to transmit a large volume of data to multiple mobile stations at the same time. In most multicast systems, the transmitter (e.g. base station) adapts its data rate to the furthest located users, so as to guarantee service quality to as many users as possible. Predictably, the more users in a multicast group, the lower data rate the base station can transmit. On the other hand, grouping more users together leads to a more efficient utilization of spectrum bandwidth, as these users are served simultaneously. This bring the interesting problem that presses for solution: how to group users in a cell into multicast groups and how to allocate a fixed amount of bandwidth resource to the groups, to achieve a good balance between throughput and fairness in multicast systems. In this paper, we formulate the united user grouping and bandwidth allocation strategy into a utility-based optimization problem. One method of signomial programming is used to solve the non-convex optimization problem. Numerical results will show that this suboptimal algorithm performs well even compared to the optimal one. Moreover, through theoretical analysis, we prove that the best user grouping and bandwidth allocation scheme of throughput maximization is to allocate the entire bandwidth to the unique group containing the users located within a ring-shaped region with an optimal outer radius r*.