Adaptive Multicast Scheduling for HSDPA Networks in Mobile Scenarios

This paper addresses the design of an innovative scheduling algorithm which optimizes the performance of Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Service (MBMS) in High Speed Packet Access (HSPA) networks. The proposed policy is based on the subgrouping approach which splits multicast members into subgroups and applies a subgroup-based Adaptive Modulation and Coding mechanism. The optimal number of multicast subgroups with the assigned radio resources is evaluated by solving an optimization problem. The robustness of the proposed approach has been investigated under different pedestrian mobility scenarios. Obtained results demonstrated that user mobility does not meaningfully influence the performance of our policy which allows to minimize the “user dissatisfaction” while increasing the network coverage.