Adaptive Beamforming and Spatial Multiplexing of Unicast and Multicast Services

This paper evaluates and compares different adaptive antenna techniques applied in the context of multicast services and presents a methodology for performing the spatial multiplexing of both unicast and multicast users. It is seen that adaptive beamforming is able to provide good results even for large groups of multicast users. A fair multicast beamforming algorithm is proposed, which focuses on the performance of the worst multicast user and particularly benefits from scenarios with strong line-of-sight. Additionally, grouping strategies that allow the allocation of the same resources to unicast and multicast users, and which make use of the proposed spatial multiplexing procedure, are shown to be more efficient than allocating separate resources to unicast and multicast users.