A proportional fair scheduling for multicast services in wireless cellular networks

We propose a new multicast scheduling scheme which can achieve the proportional fair (PF) allocation in the wireless cellular systems. In case of multicast, the scheduler in the base station should select a group of users, instead of one user, among all users who request the multicast contents. Therefore, multicasting scheduling problem is equivalent to deciding a certain modulation and coding level and a group of users who have better enough channel quality to decode the multicast data. In this work, we first extend the PF metric to the extent that the scheduler can reflect the user's time varying channel gain and fairness not only in the unicast case but also in the multicast transmission. Based on the extended PF metric, we propose a PF multicast scheduler and evaluate its performance. Our proposed algorithm outperforms other multicast scheduling schemes in terms of aggregated throughput as well as the fairness among all users.