Reducing Feedback Load of Opportunistic Multicast Scheduling over Wireless Systems

Opportunistic multicast scheduling (OMS) requires the subscribers to feed back their instantaneous channel conditions frequently, and the feedback load increases linearly as the number of subscribers in the system increases. In this letter, we propose a Weakly Consistent OMS scheme for feedback reduction. The contribution of the proposed scheme is twofold: 1) feedback load is reduced while the multicast throughput performance remains comparable with the case of full feedback, and 2) no precise knowledge of the wireless fading channel is required. Performance evaluation through realistic WiMAX simulations shows that our proposed scheme can significantly reduce 65% of the feedback load while achieving 98% multicast throughput performance compared with the case of full feedback.