Adaptive Opportunistic Multicast Scheduling Over Next-Generation Wireless Networks

This paper considers the problem of opportunistic multicast scheduling in wireless time-division multiplexing systems with adaptive modulation and channel coding. The problem is first formulated and an effective scheduling scheme is proposed to maximize the multicast throughput while a desired packet error rate is guaranteed. The proposed scheme dynamically selects multicast rates by considering the configuration of the multicast group and instantaneous network states, and thus it can adapt well to network conditions. Extensive simulation results conclusively demonstrate that, compared to the worst-user multicast scheduling, the proposed approach can increase the wireless channel efficiency by large margins, especially when the channel is operating in a lower signal-to-noise ratio region and/or when the multicast group size increases. Besides, the simulations show that the proposed approach can work well in systems with imperfect channel estimation.