Adaptive Resource Allocation to Multicast Services in LTE Systems

This paper addresses the design of an adaptive resource allocation policy for the efficient delivery of multicast services in Long Term Evolution (LTE) systems. The proposed approach overcomes the intrinsic inefficiencies of Conventional Multicast Scheme (CMS) related to the different channel quality experienced by the involved users. The basic idea is to split any multicast group into subgroups and apply subgroup-based adaptive modulation and coding schemes, which enable a more efficient exploitation of multi-user diversity. The distribution of users into subgroups is determined by the solution of an optimization problem, aiming to improve the network throughput while guaranteeing fairness among multicast members.