Cross-Layer Design of Adaptive Wireless Multicast Transmission with Truncated HARQ

This paper presents a cross-layer design of adaptive modulation and coding (AMC) with truncated hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) for one-to-many multicast transmission, in order to increase the spectral efficiency under the quality-of-service (QoS) constraints. For adaptive transmission over the channel common to the multicast group users, the AMC mode is chosen with the minimum SNR among the users to guarantee the target performance of all users. In the meanwhile, the minimum SNR required to support an AMC mode is aggressively designed by allowing retransmission with HARQ schemes. For the proposed design, we derive the average packet error rate, average number of transmission, and spectral efficiency and provide the performance numerically obtained. Numerical results show that the cross-layer design for multicast provides a significant performance gain at a small number of retransmissions as in unicast. In particular, it is observed that AMC design with HARQ is more beneficial in the low SNR region where multicast performs worse than unicast.