Adaptive Transmission Scheme for Mixed Multicast and Unicast Traffic in Cellular Systems

Wireless communication systems have been developed to support users' various requirements. Multicast and unicast transmission schemes are proposed for various types of services. The multicast transmission is known as an efficient method for group-data transmission. The data rate for multicast transmission depends on the instantaneous worst channel user. On the other hand, unicast transmission exploits wireless channel variation and achieves a multiuser diversity gain. In this paper, we evaluate and compare the system performance of multicast and unicast transmission schemes in terms of system capacity, worst average channel user's capacity, and outage probability for varying cell environments. We also propose a novel hybrid scheduling scheme for mixed multicast and unicast traffic services and compare the proposed scheme with the conventional scheme.