Multicast performance improvement strategies based on autonomous handover in wireless cellular systems

At present, mobile multimedia services such as sports information and mobile TV services have been delivered over point-to-point connetions. But it is clear that the point-to-multipoint connections can support these mobile multimedia services more efficiently because they can simultaneously transmit data packets from a single source to multiple destinations in a multicast group. Recently, the simulcast scheme for multimedia broadcast and multicast service (MBMS) in which the same signal is transmitted from all the cells within the system, has been proposed, but, in order to adopt this technology, the same channel bands or time slots for only broadcast/multicast service should be reserved at all cells. The reservation of these resources may not be suitable for services in a local region, and some operators may also not be easy to reserve these resources. So, in this paper, we propose multicast strategies which make multicast resources easily multiplex with unicast resources and enhance cell-capacity by improving the performance of cell-boundary users. In addition, we mathematically analyze the link-level performance and cell throughput of conventional and proposed schemes, and discuss their numerical results.