Fundamental Tradeoffs of Non-Orthogonal Multicast, Multicast, and Unicast in Ultra-Dense Networks

Ultra-dense networks (UDNs) are the promising technology for the fifth-generation wireless networks and beyond to significantly boost network capacity and improve network coverage by exploiting spatial spectrum reuse through the deployment of massive base stations (BSs). In this paper, the fundamental tradeoffs of non-orthogonal multicast, multicast, and unicast in the UDN are studied, to understand the impact of network densitification on them and provide some insights on UDN deployment. Non-orthogonal multicast with imperfect channel estimation and successive interference cancellation is also investigated. To evaluate the performance, a tractable model for performance analysis is developed by using stochastic geometry, and then the analytical expressions for downlink signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio coverage probability, spectrum efficiency, area traffic capacity, and energy efficiency are derived. The numerical results together with the Monte Carlo simulations are also provided. The results demonstrate that non-orthogonal multicast can further improve the performance of multicast and achieve higher spectrum efficiency, area traffic capacity, and energy efficiency than unicast from the low-to-high BS density regions, but suffers from inferior performance to unicast in the very high BS density region. The results also show that the non-orthogonal multicast and multicast exhibit different performance trends from unicast.