Multicasting in Next-Generation Software-Defined Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

Multicasting is an efficient mechanism to disseminate popular multimedia content to multiple interested third generation partnership project (3GPP) cellular users. To further enhance the multicast cellular capacity, non-3GPP WLAN networks can be leveraged to relieve the load of the 3GPP cellular networks. In this paper, we propose the distributed procedure of de-touring the multicast traffic to WLAN in the current LTE and WLAN heterogeneous network architecture. We also propose promising software-defined networking (SDN)-based centralized approach that facilitates multicast content dissemination, bringing efficiency and flexibility to the network. We analyze both the distributed and centralized approaches based on the multicast content popularity. Our analysis reveals that the SDN-based approach in heterogeneous cellular communication and multicasting brings significant radio resource savings. We also conduct packet-level simulation with a real SDN controller and smartphones to confirm the feasibility of the proposed SDN-based approach.