Radio-Aware Subgroups Formation for Multicast Traffic Delivery in WiMAX Networks

This paper focuses on the design of radio resource management policies for multicast service delivery in WiMAX networks. With the purpose of finding an alternative solution to the conventional multicast scheme that is conservative towards resource utilization, we propose to use a subgroup-based link adaptation technique that dynamically chooses the modulation and coding schemes based on the perceived channel conditions in each subgroup of multicast receivers. The main idea is to split the multicast destinations into different subgroups depending on the perceived channel quality, and to apply subgroup-based adaptive modulation and coding for a more efficient spectrum exploitation. The performance of different solutions for the subgroups formation will be analyzed and their effectiveness evaluated through simulations to show how the network can take advantage from the proposed subgrouping approach.