A simulated annealing algorithm for the transmission mode selection of multicast services in LTE networks

A simulated annealing (SA) algorithm is proposed for the transmission mode selection of multicast services in LTE networks. The multicast services can be transmitted by single frequency network (SFN) mode and point-to-multipoint (PTM) mode, and the unicast services are delivered with point-to-point (PTP) mode. To avoid the network congestion in LTE networks with the multicast and unicast mixed services, the demanded resources of the maximum load cell is minimized by selecting the optimal mode between SFN and PTM for multicast services. The transmission mode selection problem is solved by means of SA heuristics. Simulation results show that the proposed SA algorithm achieves less demanded resources of the maximum load cell than SFN mode for all the multicast services.