Rate guarantees for multicast scheduling in high speed cellular networks

Abstract

This paper targets multicast packet scheduling over cellular networks like High Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA). The salient benefit of multicast is to avoid clogging up the air interface with redundant data transmissions. When allocating resources to users of a system, it should be aimed at fulfilling QoS requirements instead of only providing fairness or maximizing the system throughput. This paper addresses QoS-based scheduling for multicast video streaming for which minimum bitrate requirements are particularly stringent. Hence, we adapt Minimum Guaranteed Bit Rate (Min GBR) scheduler by Hosein (2002) to multicast. In this context, we introduce different versions, namely the cluster-size agnostic and the clustersize aware. Solutions are tested with homogeneous clustering and mixed clustering. These proposals offer different trade-offs between QoS guarantees and the overall diversity gain.