On the management of unicast and multicast services in LTE networks

Among the solutions for broadband wireless access (BWA) provisioning, Long Term Evolution (LTE) represents one the most promising technologies. In order to effectively support the tremendous growth of mobile broadband services required by the users of the fifth generation (5G) systems, LTE is claimed to efficiently manage the contemporary presence of traditional unicast and value-added multicast services. In this paper, we propose an effective strategy for joint multicast and unicast scheduling in LTE networks which distributes system resources among unicast and multicast services by taking into account the instantaneous load conditions while guaranteeing session quality improvements to both unicast and multicast services. In particular, the designed policy firstly performs the allocation of the resources required for the delivery of minimum requested data rate for both unicast and multicast services. Subsequently, unicast and multicast services equally share the remaining network resources; while resource assignment of additional resources to unicast users is accomplished through a maximum throughput approach, multicast services are managed through a subgroup-based resource allocation scheme. Simulations highlight the effectiveness of the proposed strategy in several scenarios and under different traffic loads