Power efficient multicast transmission framework with QoS awareness

Multicast is recognized as an efficient transmission mechanism for delivering large number of common data to different mobile users. One inherent drawback of multicast transmission is that in order to guarantee the quality of service for each mobile user, the transmitter needs to adapt its data rate to the user(s) with worst channel condition in a multicast group. Therefore, power consumption could be seriously arisen. In order to address this problem, in this work we propose an energy efficient framework called Multicast Support Multicast (MSM) and examine its energy saving performance. The proposed MSM can dynamically use an extra channel as an additional support for traditional multicast transmission, by which power consumption of transmitter can be reduced. Moreover, through formulating optimization problem, we also discuss user grouping scheme that allows us to obtain the optimal energy saving gain. Numerical examples are presented to illustrate the proposed scheme and to show the performance gains obtained by employing additional multicast channel(s) and optimal user grouping.