The rapid demand growth for group-oriented services mandates telco operators to efficiently manage the contemporary presence of the unicast services and the emerging multicast applications. We propose a novel radio resource management approach for providing fair throughput to unicast and multicast users in a broadband wireless network. The idea is to assign unicast subscribers to a virtual group in order to compete on an equal footing with multicast users for network resource distribution. We also revisit the traditional fairness indexes in order to capture the fairness in the degree of user satisfaction for unicast and multicast users. Simulations highlight the effectiveness of the virtual group strategy in terms of achieved fairness in several scenarios and under different traffic loads.
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