On the throughput-delay tradeoff in cellular multicast

In this paper, we adopt a cross layer design approach for analyzing the throughput-delay tradeoff of the multicast channel in a single cell system. To illustrate the main ideas, we start with the single group case, i.e., pure multicast, where a common information stream is requested by all the users. We consider three classes of scheduling algorithms with progressively increasing complexity. The first class strives for minimum complexity by resorting to a static scheduling strategy along with memoryless decoding. Our analysis for this class of scheduling algorithms reveals the existence of a static scheduling policy that achieves the optimal scaling law of the throughput at the expense of a delay that increases exponentially with the number of users. The second scheduling policy resorts to a higher complexity incremental redundancy encoding/decoding strategy to achieve a superior throughput-delay tradeoff. The third, and most complex, scheduling strategy benefits from the cooperation between the different users to minimize the delay while achieving the optimal scaling law of the throughput. In particular, the proposed cooperative multicast strategy is shown to simultaneously achieve the optimal scaling laws of both throughput and delay. Then, we generalize our scheduling algorithms to exploit the multi-group diversity available when different information streams are requested by different subsets of the user population. Finally, we discuss the potential gains of equipping the base station with multiple transmit antennas and present simulation results that validate our theoretical claims.