Multicasting in LTE-A networks enhanced by device-to-device communications

The growing demand for group-oriented services has recently attracted the interest of the research community. Several proposals have been designed for the most promising broadband wireless system, Long Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-A), to enhance key performance figures such as spectrum efficiency, data rate and user satisfaction. Starting from the standard proposals for multicasting and broadcasting systems, in this paper we investigate the potentialities of Device to Device (D2D) communications for enhancing the performance of multicast communications. While keeping the objective of serving all users in a multicast group, as for the Conventional Multicast Scheme (CMS), more performing Modulation and Coding Schemes (MCS) are adopted in the path from the base station to users, by leveraging D2D links to serve nodes with worse channel conditions. Radio resources for the activated transmission links from the base station and for the D2D links are managed in order to maximize the aggregate data rate. A simulative performance evaluation in a wide set of scenarios shows the significant achievable improvements.