Fairness-Aware Pattern-Based Multiple Access for Multi-Group Multicast Systems

摘要

In this paper, we propose pattern-based multicast transmission in a multi-group environment with fairness-aware resource allocation. Traditionally, pattern division multiple access (PDMA) determines the allocation of available radio resources to individual users. In the proposed work, we develop a scheme to assign unique patterns or signatures to multicast groups sharing the same radio resources. When allocating resources to a group, we deal with channel state information (CSI) for all users within the multicast group as to optimize the fairness parameter representing the achievable data rates of different users. In our scheme, to differentiate signals from various multicast groups, we consider resource blocks spanning multiple aspects of signal separation. Within this paper, we demonstrate the principles of the proposed scheme by working with code and frequency allocation. Specifically, PDMA is developed to improve the throughput for each multicast group while maximizing fairness among the groups. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed PDMA has comparable performance to that of orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA) multicasting in terms of aggregate data rate. However, PDMA outperforms OFDMA in terms of inter-group fairness, which makes it a suitable candidate for multi-group multicast transmissions.