A Unified Approach for Efficient Delivery of Unicast and Multicast Wireless Video Services

Recently, mobile multimedia services have represented an increasingly large source of revenue for the telecommunication industry. Subscribers are often interested in simultaneously receiving the same data flow and, hence, they fuel the growing demand of multicast multimedia services. Therefore, the design of efficient radio resource management strategies to jointly handle multicast and more traditional unicast traffic and to increase user satisfaction is of primary importance for the successful deployment of future mobile networks. This paper proposes an efficient radio resource management framework to handle unicast and multicast multi-layer video services. The proposed Virtual Unified Group (VUG) approach makes use of a channel-aware subgrouping principle to provide fair throughput to both unicast and multicast users. The idea is to assign unicast subscribers to a virtual group thus allowing them to compete for network resources on an equal footing with multicast users. Simulations highlight the benefits that VUG provides in a Long Term Evolution (LTE) network scenario, under different traffic load conditions, in terms of throughput and fairness in the distribution of resources to unicast and multicast users.