Radio Resource Management in Wireless Networks with Multicast Transmissions

Abstract

With the increasing demand for wireless communications, radio resource management (RRM) plays an important role in future wireless networks in order to provide higher data rates and better quality of services, given the limited amount of available radio resources. Although some specific features of wireless communication networks cause challenges to effective and efficient RRM, they bring opportunities that help improv- ing network performance and resource utilization. In this thesis, we focus on RRM issues related to the broadcast/multicast nature in wireless communication networks. The work is divided into two parts. In the first part, we exploit how to take advantage of the broadcast nature of wire- less transmissions in RRM by opportunistically applying two-way relaying (or network coding) and traditional one-way relaying. Different objectives are considered, includ- ing maximizing total packet transmission throughput (Chapter 2), minimizing costs related to transmission power and delay (Chapter 3), and minimizing packet transmis- sion delay subject to maximum and average transmission power limits (Chapter 4). While designing these scheduling schemes, the random traffic and channel conditions are also taken into consideration. Our results show that the proposed opportunis- tic scheduling schemes can indeed take good advantage of the broadcast feature at the relay nodes and achieve much higher throughput and, in some scenarios, provide close-to-optimum QoS performance. The second part (Chapter 5) of the thesis deals with the issue of efficient resource management in multicast communications, where we study channel sharing and power allocations for multicast device-to-divice (D2D) communication groups underlaying a cellular network. In such a scenario, D2D multicasting together with the mutual inter- ference between cellular and D2D communications, makes the interference conditions and power allocations a very complicated issue. Different approaches are proposed that allow each D2D group to share the cellular channels and allocate transmission power to each D2D and cellular transmitter, so that the sum throughput of D2D and cellular users is maximized. Our results indicate that it is possible to achieve close-to-optimum throughput performance in such a network.