Multicast scheduling for delay‐energy trade‐off under bursty request arrivals in cellular networks

Abstract

In this study, the authors consider the utilisation of multicast technology in cellular networks given different arrival patterns for the content requests of mobile users. Traditionally, the performance evaluation of multicast in the literature usually depends on the adoption of temporal Poisson processes for content requests, which is not accurate any more according to many real data measurements. Therefore, to make use of the bursty nature of content requests, they propose a hybrid unicast/multicast strategy where the base station (BS) can perform the unicast or multicast procedure according to its serving status. By modelling the complete process into a circular Markov chain, they derive the average latency of content requests and the average power consumption of BSs under different arrival patterns and serving configurations in theoretical and/or simulative ways. Moreover, the multicast threshold introduced in their strategy can be dynamically adjusted to achieve a joint optimisation between average latency and power consumption when confronted with varied demands. Numerous results show that the proposed strategy can not only reduce the average latency of content requests but also decrease the average power consumption of BSs, especially under the bursty request arrival patterns.