Resource Efficient Opportunistic Multicast Scheduling for IPTV over Mobile WiMAX

Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) is an emerging and killer application for WiMAX networks, which takes advantage of multicasting mechanisms to efficiently deliver the video data to groups of subscribers. In this paper, we propose a Reception-rate-tracking Opportunistic Multicast Scheduling (ROMS) to enhance the performance of scalable IPTV layered multicasting over WiMAX networks. The proposed ROMS jointly considers the subscriber scheduling and resource allocation to achieve resource efficient multicasting. We validate our solution through theoretical analyses and empirical simulations. Our study indicates that the proposed solution outperforms the Slot-throughput-tracking Opportunistic Multicast Scheduling (SOMS) in terms of resource efficiency for 19.6%-33% in different subscriber group sizes.