Multicast scheduling with resource fairness constraints

Integration of multicast and unicast data in future radio access networks will be necessary in order to improve the resource efficiency and provide new services. Such integration requires new and efficient resource sharing mechanisms. These mechanisms need to be optimized to provide the best possible trade-off between resource efficiency and fairness. In this article, we consider a case where streaming multicast users are multiplexed together with elastic unicast users on a common time-slotted channel. We derive a system model to study the performance of various resource allocations strategies under proportional and resource fairness constraints. Fairness is directly defined in terms of the users’ utilities rather than of the throughputs they are assigned to. We also describe an extension of the well-known unicast proportional fair scheduler to the multicast scenario. Through extensive simulations we demonstrate the performance of this scheduler for various traffic loads and multicast group sizes.