Bargaining Solutions for Multicast Subgroup Formation in LTE

This paper focuses on the design of radio resource management policies for efficient delivery of multicast services in Long Term Evolution (LTE) systems. In order to find alternative solutions to the Conventional Multicast Scheme (CMS), an effective framework is proposed that splits multicast destinations into different subgroups, depending on the User Equipments (UEs) channel quality, and applies a subgroup based Adaptive Modulation and Coding (AMC) scheme. This approach allows a more efficient spectrum exploitation. Game theoretic notions are used for the multicast subgroups formation and the resource allocation problems. The effectiveness of the proposed framework is evaluated and four different bargaining solutions are compared in terms of data rate, fairness, and subgroup configurations.