On the impact of frequency selectivity on multicast subgroup formation in 4G networks

This paper deals with the transmission of group-oriented services, considered as the main value-added for the future 4G broadband wireless systems. In this scenario, the design of proper resource allocation strategies is a key issue in order to offer high quality services to involved users and to efficiently exploit the available radio resources. In this paper we extend the works existing in literature by evaluating the impact of frequency selectivity on the performance in terms of spectral efficiency achieved when group-oriented services are provided in Long Term Evolution (LTE) and LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) systems. We conducted exhaustive simulation campaigns in order to define the scenarios that could benefit of the exploitation of frequency selectivity in multicast resource allocation. We investigated single- and multi-group scenarios with different application profiles, such as real time video flows, and we considered several deployment cases addressing different channel bandwidth and user configurations.