Multiple Multicast Transmission Exploiting Channel Simplification

Abstract

In this letter, we present a spectrally efficient multicast method which enables a transmitter to simultaneously transmit multiple multicast streams without any interference among multicast groups. By using unique combiners at receivers with multiple antennas within each multicast group, the proposed method simplifies multiple channels between the transmitter and the receivers to an equivalent channel. In addition, we establish the sufficient condition for the system configuration which should be satisfied for the channel simplification and provide a combiner design technique for the receivers. To remove interference among multicast groups, the precoder for the transmitter is designed by utilizing the equivalent channels. By exploiting time resources efficiently, the channel simplification (CS) based method achieves a higher sum rate than the time division multiplexing (TDM) based method, which the existing multicast techniques fundamentally employ, at high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime. Furthermore, we present a multicast method combining the CS based method with the TDM based method to utilize the benefits of both methods. Simulation results successfully demonstrate that the combined multicast method obtains a better sum rate performance at overall SNR regime.