Adaptive Transmission Scheme for Mixed Multicast and Unicast Traffic in Cellular Systems

Wireless communication systems have been developed to support users´ various requirements. Multicast and unicast transmission schemes are proposed for various types of services. The multicast transmission is known as an efficient method for group-data transmission. The data rate for multicast transmission depends on the instantaneous worst channel user. On the other hand, unicast transmission exploits wireless channel variation and achieves a multiuser diversity gain. In this paper, we evaluate and compare the system performance of multicast and unicast transmission schemes in terms of system capacity, worst average channel user´s capacity, and outage probability for varying cell environments. We also propose a novel hybrid scheduling scheme for mixed multicast and unicast traffic services and compare the proposed scheme with the conventional scheme.