Energy Efficiency of Unicast Support Multicast with QoS Guarantee

Multicast transmission is known as an efficient mechanism for offering the same services for different terminals. However, the power consumption is surprisingly arisen due to terminals with the worst channel quality while maintaining the Quality of Service (QoS) and data decoding requirements. In order to address this problem, we examine the energy saving performance of an efficient algorithm called Unicast Support Multicast (USM), which can dynamically and expeditiously use unicast transmission as an additional support for multicast transmission. The USM algorithm can overcome the inherent drawbacks of multicast transmission, and decrease the power consumption with QoS guarantee. Numerical results based on the conducted theoretical analysis demonstrate that power consumption is reduced with USM while fulfilling the data rate and decoding requirements. In addition, the energy efficiency of USM is superior compared to pure multicast transmission.