Exploiting frequency-selectivity in real-time multicast services over LTE networks

Long Term Evolution (LTE) is considered the most promising cellular system able to support the growing demand of multicast services (e.g., IPTV, video streaming) over mobile terminals. The design of effective strategies for the management of these applications is still an open issue, especially in scenarios where several multicast streams are simultaneously transmitted in a cell. In this paper we propose different resource allocation policies for the delivery of multicast scalable video flows. Such policies efficiently exploit the multi-user diversity and the frequency selectivity in order to match the requirements of both users and providers. The performance of the proposed strategies is analyzed through simulations by evaluating different cell deployment and user load environments and by focusing on spectral efficiency, throughput, fairness, and amount of resources needed for multicast service delivery. The last parameter is important in practical scenarios where multicast services share the available resources with other flows, e.g., unicast services.