Resource Allocation Frameworks for Broadcast and Multicast Service Delivery

Delivery of Point-to-Multipoint (PtM) services over 4G cellular networks is gaining momentum. This thesis focusses on two different broadcast/multicast service types: fully reliable and delay sensitive services. The first category imposes that each PtM communication is delivered in an acknowledged fashion. On the other hand, the delay sensitive category embraces all those services aiming at broadcasting and multicasting, in an unacknowledged way, multimedia traffic flows (such as layered video services belonging to the H.264/SVC family). For what concerns fully reliable services, this thesis proposes a Modified HARQ scheme characterized by a minimum energy consumption and reduced delivery delivery. Furthermore, in a similar system model, we propose an optimized error control strategy based on the Network Coding (NC) principle. Also in that case, the proposed strategy aims at minimizing the overall transmission energy and significantly reducing the communication delay. In addition, we propose multiple NC-based broadcast/multicast communication strategies suitable for delay sensitive services. We prove that they can efficiently minimize either the transmission energy or delivery delay. In particular, this thesis also refers to video service delivery over 3GPP's LTE and LTE-A networks as eMBMS flows. We address the problem of optimizing the radio resource allocation process of eMBMS video streams so that users, according to their propagation conditions, can receive services at the maximum achievable service level in a given cell (depending on their propagation conditions). Developed resource allocation models can minimize the overall radio resource footprint. This thesis also proposes an efficient power allocation model for delay sensitive services, delivered by the NC approach over OFDMA systems. The developed allocation model can significantly reduce the overall energy footprint of the transmitting node.