Low complexity subgroup formation

in LTE systems
G. Araniti

, M. Condoluci

, A. Molinaro

, A. Iera

, J. Cosmas

ARTS Lab., DIIES Dep., University Mediterranea of Reggio Calabria, Italy

e-mail: {araniti, massimo.condoluci, antonella.molinaro, antonio.iera}@unirc.it.

WNCC, Brunel University, London, UK

e-mail: john.cosmas@brunel.ac.uk.
AbstractIn this paper, we address the denition of a low-
complexity subgroup formation algorithm for multicast data
delivery in Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks. With this
aim, we extend the subgroup merging scheme (SMS), designed
for generic Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access
(OFDMA) systems, by proposing two low-complexity subgroup
formation schemes, named L-SMS and L-eSMS. Such schemes
are tailored to exploit the great potentialities of LTE systems.
Specically, L-SMS is proposed in order to improve the scalability
of SMS by handling a more efcient subgroup formation scheme
with a computational cost which does not depend on the multicast
group size. The L-eSMS also improves the resource assignment
phase with the aim to achieve better near-optimal performance
compared to L-SMS. Through simulations, we evaluated the
effectiveness of the proposed schemes in different cell deploy-
ment and multicast conguration scenarios. The achieved results
underlined that the proposed L-eSMS is well designed in order
to guarantee performance close to the optimal one.
Index TermsNetworking and QoS, Trafc and performance
monitoring, Multicast, LTE.
I. INTRODUCTION
T
HE denition of effective radio resource management
(RRM) strategies is a key issue in order to efciently
support high quality group-oriented services (i.e., broadcast
and multicast) in Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple
Access (OFDMA) systems. Such services (e.g., multimedia
downloading, video conferencing, mobile TV) are gaining in
importance in the current mobile market scenario and are ex-
pected to be massively exchanged over Long Term Evolution
(LTE) [1] networks. LTE, standardized by the Third Genera-
tion Partnership Project (3GPP), is a promising standard for
cellular communications designed to guarantee low latency,
increased system capacity, and improved spectral efciency
in both downlink and uplink transmissions compared to other
wireless systems [2]. Such aspects enhance the user-network
interaction in mobile environments and signicantly improve
their service experience [3] [4].
LTE can couple with the Multimedia Broadcast/Multicast
Service [5], which allows an optimized transmission of group-
oriented services over wireless cellular networks. In group-
This full text paper was peer reviewed at the direction of IEEE Commu-
nications Society subject matter experts for publication in the proceedings of
2013 IEEE International Symposium on Broadband Multimedia Systems and
Broadcasting (BMSB 2013)
DOI: 10.1109/BMSB.2013.6621786
oriented environments, the key issue to consider is related
to the link adaptation. Indeed, multicast link adaptation is
performed by adapting the transmission parameters on a per-
group basis. According to a conservative approach [6], the data
stream is simultaneously conveyed to the whole set of desti-
nations with the transmission parameters selected according
to the worst channel conditions experienced in the multicast
group. This approach drastically bounds the multicast session
performance and does not exploit the great spectrum manage-
ment potentialities offered by OFDMA systems. Another so-
lution for resource allocation in multicast environments is the
opportunistic approach [7] that foresees to dynamically change
the portion of served multicast members by selecting, in any
given time slot, the best users to schedule. Such a portion is
selected in order to optimize a given objective function (such
as system throughput maximization) or through a threshold-
based approach where only the users which overcome the
threshold value (for example, a signal to noise ratio target
value) are selected for data delivery [7]. Although opportunis-
tic multicasting allows meaningful throughput improvements
in terms of instantaneous throughput and spectrum efciency
compared to a conservative approach, the price to pay for these
improvements is a reduction in terms of multicast gain, i.e.,
the reduction of the number of users successfully served in
each time slot. Moreover, opportunistic multicasting requires
the exploitation of rateless codes for guaranteeing data stream
reception to the users served in different time slots [7].
An interesting approach proposed to overcome the limi-
tations of above mentioned schemes is the subgrouping [8],
based on the idea of dividing the group members into sub-
groups according to the experienced channel conditions [9].
This technique allows to serve all the multicast destinations
while exploiting multi-user diversity. Moreover, by taking
advantage of Scalable Video Coding (SVC), the subgroup-
ing approach represents an effective solution for efciently
conveying high quality broadband multicast services, such as
IPTV. The goals of subgrouping is to guarantee (i) multicast
gain maximization, (ii) a basic quality at all the group
members, (iii) improved session quality for the users with
better channel qualities. The selection of the most suitable
subgroup conguration requires to determine the number of
subgroups with the related transmission parameters, and the
adequate distribution of resources among such subgroups.
Nevertheless, the main issue related to subgroup-based policies
is that it poses additional constraints in terms of computation
complexity. Low-complexity sub-optimal schemes [10] are
preferred in practical systems, though the issue to solve in
this scenario is the proper design of a low-complex scheme
which does not meaningfully affect the system performance
compared to the optimal admissible one. The contribution of
this paper is to propose two policies for resource allocation in
LTE multicast environments, named L-SMS and L-eSMS. Such
policies are designed in order to guarantee low-complexity
subgroup formation, high scalability and near-optimal per-
formance in order to improve the throughput performance
experienced by MBMS users.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Section
II provides an overview on LTE systems. In Section III we
discuss about the related work, whereas in Section IV we
present the proposed L-SMS and L-eSMS policies. Section V
provides the results achieved by simulation campaigns. Finally,
conclusion and future works are summarized in Section VI.
II. THE LTE SYSTEM
The LTE system [1] represents the most promising cellular
system able to support the growing demand of high-quality
[11] and novel services [12] over mobile terminals. LTE
is characterized by a at all-IP network architecture which
allows to reduce the latency in both control and data planes.
The main entity in the radio access network is the eNodeB,
the LTE base station, which forwards both control and data
trafcs towards mobile users and performs link adaptation
procedures. The most important entity in the control plane is
the Mobility Management Entity (MME), located in the core
network, which is in charge for authentication, security, and
mobility management. The exploitation of OFDMA and Sin-
gle Carrier Frequency Division Multiple Access (SC-FDMA)
transmissions, with the joint use of Multiple Input Multiple
Output (MIMO) techniques, guarantees higher data rates and
spectral efciency compared to previous cellular systems. The
network architecture of LTE is designed in order to couple
with the MBMS standard [5], which denes both radio access
[1] and core network functional entities in order to provide
group-oriented services.
In the radio access network, the MBMS sessions are con-
veyed to involved users through point-to-multipoint transmis-
sions, managed by the packet scheduler which is implemented
at the Medium Access Control (MAC) of the eNodeB. It per-
forms the RRM by efciently handling the resource allocation
in both time and frequency domains. In details, the Time
Domain Packet Scheduler (TDPS) selects the ows which
must be served during every TTI (lasting 1 ms), according
to the their QoS constraints. The Frequency Domain Packet
Scheduler (FDPS) is in charge of performing the link adapta-
tion by assigning a modulation and coding scheme (MCS) at
each assigned resource, i.e., the Resource Block (RB), which
consists of 12 adjacent sub-carries and lasts 0.5 ms. The link
adaptation procedure is based on the Channel Quality Indicator
(CQI) feedbacks transmitted by the User Equipments (UEs)
at the eNodeB. The CQI indicates the maximum supported
MCS value according to channel conditions experienced by the
mobile terminal. Table I lists the CQI-MCS mapping dened
in the LTE system [13].
TABLE I
CQI-MCS MAPPING
CQI Modulation Code rate Spectral Efciency
index Scheme [bit/s/Hz]
1 QPSK 0.076 0.1523
2 QPSK 0.120 0.2344
3 QPSK 0.190 0.3770
4 QPSK 0.300 0.6016
5 QPSK 0.440 0.8770
6 QPSK 0.590 1.1758
7 16-QAM 0.370 1.4766
8 16-QAM 0.480 1.9141
9 16-QAM 0.600 2.4063
10 64-QAM 0.450 2.7305
11 64-QAM 0.550 3.3223
12 64-QAM 0.650 3.9023
13 64-QAM 0.750 4.5234
14 64-QAM 0.850 5.1152
15 64-QAM 0.930 5.5547
III. RELATED WORK
A group-oriented environment is characterized by the pres-
ence of multiple destinations requiring the same data trafc.
In such an environment, two transmission modes are dened
for data delivery: Point-to-Point (PtP) and Point-to-Multipoint
(PtM). Whereas the former is based on an unicast transmission
for each multicast member, PtM mode exploits the broadcast
nature of the radio channel by using a single transmission to
feed the whole multicast group. Several studies highlighted
that the PtM mode has better performance, compared to the
PtP, in terms of system resources exploitation. Indeed, PtM
theoretically offers unlimited system capacity and this aspect
makes the PtM approach the most promising technique for
multicast content delivery. However, a weak aspect of such
an approach is that the channel qualities of all the multicast
members have to be considered by the RRM in order to
select the most suitable MCS. A conservative approach is at
the basis of the Conventional Multicast Scheme (CMS) [6]
which performs the MCS selection according to the worst CQI
value among those collected by the eNodeB. Although this
policy maximizes the system capacity (i.e., the number of UEs
successfully served) and the fairness among multicast destina-
tions, the multicast session performance will be bounded by
the terminal experiencing the poorest channel conditions, with
a consequent high dissatisfaction for the users with better
channel qualities.
Another strategy is the opportunistic multicasting [7], where
the portion of scheduled multicast members dynamically
changes slot by slot in order to efciently exploit the multi-
user diversity. In [7], authors proposed different algorithms
with the aim to maximize the total throughput and to analyze
the throughput and delay trade-offs for each considered algo-
rithm. Although opportunistic multicasting allows meaningful
improvements in terms of instantaneous throughput and spec-
tral efciency, a minimum QoS requirement is not guaranteed
in resource allocation on a short-term run.
An interesting approach aiming at overcoming the limita-
tions of above considered policies, while guaranteeing multi-
cast gain maximization, is the subgrouping [8] [9]. According
to it, multicast members are split into subgroups based on
the experienced channel conditions in order to exploit the
radio channel utilization and the multi-user diversity. As
demonstrated in [14] [15] [16], a subgroup-based resource
allocation can signicantly improves the performance in mul-
ticast content delivery. In such a context, besides evaluating of
the most adequate number of subgroups to activate, the RRM
has to select the MCS and the number of RBs to assign to each
enabled subgroup. Although simulation results demonstrated
that subgrouping is able to signicantly improve the system
performance, a subgroup formation based on an Exhaustive
Search Scheme (ESS) introduces a high computational burden
which limits the effectiveness of subgrouping to be imple-
mented in practical systems. Indeed, the resource allocation
must be performed within a scheduling frame lasting few
milliseconds, and this aspect is more evident in LTE systems
where, as mentioned before, link adaptation is performed
every 1 ms. As a consequence, low-complexity schemes are
required. Although low-complexity approaches are designed
with the aim to drastically decrease the time required for
resource allocation, the issue to be solved is that they achieve
sub-optimal results compared to the ESS with a consequent
reduction in terms of system performance improvements. One
of the most interesting policy is the subgroup merging scheme
(SMS) [10], designed to couple with OFDMA-based systems
and to maximize the system throughput, i.e., the Aggregate
Data Rate (ADR). SMS starts the iteration by adopting a
conventional unicast scheme, i.e., by enabling a subgroup for
each user in the multicast group. Then it searches, through all
the combinations, the two subgroups to merge which guarantee
the highest ADR increase compared to the previous iteration;
it continues to try merging subgroups until no further ADR
improvement is achieved or no subgroups can be merged. The
complexity of SMS is O(K
4
), where K is the number of users
joined in the multicast group. As a consequence, SMS suffers
from scalability. Being based on an initial unicast scheme,
the main issue of SMS is that it requires to assign, at least,
one frequency resource to each multicast member. This aspect
do not make SMS suitable in many practical scenarios, i.e.,
when few resources are available for multicast services or large
multicast groups must be served.
IV. OUR PROPOSAL
In this paper we extend the SMS approach, designed
for low-complexity subgroup formation in OFDMA-based
systems, by proposing the L-SMS and L-eSMS tailored to
efciently couple with LTE networks. The former is designed
in order to improve scalability of SMS by proposing a more
efcient approach with a computational cost which does not
depend on the number of users joined in the multicast group.
TABLE II
THE L-SMS APPROACH
1: Dene S = {1, 2, . . . , S}
2: Dene Us, s S
3: Dene R = {0, . . . , 0}, with |R| = |S|
4: Compute rs R, s S, with

sS
rs = R
5: Compute
1
=

sS
bsrs|Us|
6: t = 2
7: while t |S| do
8: Find i, j S that maximise t
9: t =
t1
b
i
r
i
|U
i
| b
j
r
j
|U
j
| + bnrn|Un|
10: where n = arg min(b
i
, b
j
), rn = r
i
+ r
j
, and Un = U
i
U
j
11: if t >
t1
then
12: Update S = S {i, j} {n}
13: Update R
14: rn = r
i
+ r
j
, with n = arg min(b
i
, b
j
)
15: r
i
= 0, r
j
= 0
16: t = t + 1
17: else
18: Stop
19: end if
20: end while
Moreover, compared to SMS, L-SMS guarantees to perform
subgroup formation also when few frequency resources are
available for multicast services. The latter proposed policy,
aimed at achieving better near-optimal performance compared
to L-SMS, deals with the RB assignment phase in order to
improve the throughput experienced by MBMS users.
A. The L-SMS
In analogy to SMS, L-SMS manages the subgroup formation
according to the channel conditions experienced by multicast
users, i.e., the CQI feedback in LTE systems. Obviously, L-
SMS is designed to maximize the sum of data rates assigned
to all the multicast users in a group, i.e., the ADR. L-SMS
proceeds by iterative steps; at each step it tries to maximize the
ADR of the enabled subgroups, and it stops when no further
improvement is achieved or no other subgroups are available.
L-SMS is summarized in Table II. At the rst iteration, L-
SMS gathers all the users reporting the same CQI value in
the same subgroup. Such set of users is denoted with U
s
, i.e.,
U
s
contains all the users experiencing a CQI value equal to s.
The number of created subgroups is equal to the number of
different measured CQI levels, i.e., S, and it is bounded by the
maximum number of CQI levels dened by LTE system, i.e.,
S 15. The created subgroup conguration is denoted with
the R vector. If r
s
R (with s = 1, 2, . . . , S) is greater than
zero, the subgroup related to the s-th MCS is enabled and r
s
represents the number of RBs assigned to such subgroup. The
data rate achieved by each subgroup depends on the transport
block size of the MCS related to the subgroup, i.e., b
s
[1],
and the number of assigned resources, i.e., r
s
. At the end of
this step, the initial value of the target cost function, the ADR,
is computed. L-SMS searches through all the combinations of
two subgroups to merge and selects the one with the highest
ADR. If by merging the two selected subgroups the target
function increases compared to the previous step, then L-
SMS will merge the users and the resources of the selected
subgroups into a new subgroup. This process is iterated until
no further improvement in the cost function value is achieved
or no subgroup to merge is available.
The overall complexity of L-SMS is equal to O(S
4
);
therefore, L-SMS is more feasible for real implementation
compared to the ESS, which requires O(S
R
) [10], where R
is the overall number of available resources. It is worth noting
that, differently from SMS [10], the computational cost of L-
SMS does not depend on the number of users in the multicast
group, hence it is more scalable than SMS.
B. The L-eSMS
Another key issue in the subgroup merging approach is re-
lated to the distribution of the R available frequency resources
among the subgroups enabled at the rst iteration. Both SMS
and L-SMS randomly distribute the resources among the
formed subgroups (refer to line 4 in Table II). This choice may
cause inefciency especially in scenarios where the multicast
users experience heterogeneous channel qualities. With the aim
of improving the ADR of the subgroup conguration enabled
at the rst step, we extend the proposed L-SMS scheme by
dening the L-eSMS, tailored to better exploit the multi-user
diversity in the resource allocation phase.
The novel resource distribution strategy is based on the
denition of a weight
s
, dened as follows:

s
=
b
s
|U
s
|

iS
b
i
|U
i
|
(1)
Once
s
is computed for each subgroup, the RB assignment is
performed as follows. At each group is assigned at every sub-
group enabled in the rst iteration. The remaining resources,
i.e., RS, are allocated to the subgroup with the highest
s
value, i.e, s

= arg max
s
. The RB allocation of step 4 in
Table II can be recast as follows:
r
s
=

R S + 1 if s = arg max
s
1 otherwise
(2)
where S 15 is the number of subgroups enabled at the rst
step. Eq. (2) guarantees that each enabled subgroup is served
with at least one frequency resource, whereas the subgroup
which achieves the higher amount of resources is selected in
order to guarantee improved ADR performance in the initial
conguration. As a consequence, L-eSMS aims at assigning
more resources to more populated subgroups or to subgroups
supporting higher MCSs.
The overall complexity of L-eSMS is equal to O(S
4
), i.e.,
the proposed RB assignment strategy does not change the
complexity cost compared to L-SMS.
V. PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS
The performance analysis has been conducted in accordance
with the guidelines dened in [17]. The channel quality of
each multicast member is evaluated in terms of Signal to
Interference and Noise Ratio (SINR) experienced over each
sub-carrier [18]:
SINR
i
=
P
0
PL
0
h
0

NBS
j=1
(P
j
PL
j
h
j
) +N
o
(3)
where P
j
, PL
j
and h
j
are the transmission power, the path
loss, and the small scale fast fading of the link between the
UE and the j-th base station (j = 0 indicates the serving base
station, j > 0 the interfering ones); N
o
is the noise power.
Once the SINR value for all the sub-carriers is collected, the
effective SINR is obtained through the Exponential Effective
SIR Mapping (EESM):
SINR
eff
= ln

1
N
sub
N
sub

i=1
e

SINR
i

(4)
being N
sub
the overall number of sub-carriers and a scaling
factor used to adjust the mismatch between the actual and
the predicted block error rate (BLER). Finally, the effective
SINR is mapped onto the CQI level related to the MCS which
ensures a BLER smaller than 10% [18]. More details on the
LTE system settings are listed in Table III.
TABLE III
MAIN SIMULATION ASSUMPTION
Parameters Value
Cell layout 3GPP Macro-cell case #1
Cell radius 500 m
Distance attenuation 128.1+37.6*log(d), d [km]
Shadow fading Log-normal,0 mean, = 8 [dB]
Fast Fading ITU-R PedB (extended for OFDM)
Scheduling frame 10 ms
TTI 1 ms
Carrier frequency 2 GHz
eNodeB transmit power 20 W, 13 dB
Maximum antenna gain 11.5 dB
Thermal Noise -100 dBm
Fig. 1. User distribution within the cell.
We compared the performance of the proposed L-SMS and
L-eSMS policies with that of ESS and CMS. Simulations have
been carried out by addressing a uniform user distribution
scenario, where the users are uniformly distributed within the
cell coverage area (Fig. 1). We consider two simulation cases:
Scenario A, where we considered a variable number of
users (from 10 to 100) and a xed bandwidth deployment
scenario of 100 RBs;
Scenario B, where we varied the number of RBs (from
15 to 100) in a multicast group conguration with 100
members.
10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100
0
250
500
750
1000
1250
1500
A
D
R

[
M
b
p
s
]
Multicast Group Size

CMS
ESS
LSMS
LeSMS
(a) Aggregate Data Rate
10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100
0
20
40
60
80
100

A
D
R

[
%
]
Multicast Group Size

LSMS
LeSMS
(b)
ADR
Fig. 2. Simulation results in Scenario A.
Outputs are achieved by averaging a sufcient number of
simulation results to obtain 95% condence intervals.
Fig. 2 shows the comparison of CMS, ESS, L-SMS, and
L-eSMS schemes in the Scenario A. Subgrouping strategies
considerably improve the ADR performance, as depicted in
Fig. 2(a), with respect to the CMS. Indeed, the ADR of CMS
varies from 50 up to 260 Mbps, whereas that of ESS increases
from 157.2 to 1305 Mbps. The L-SMS achieves an ADR
performance which varies from 108 to 838 Mbps. Finally,
the ADR of L-eSMS increases from 154 Mbps up to 1247
Mbps. It emerges that L-eSMS offers performance closer to
optimal compared to L-SMS. This is more evident in Fig. 2(b),
which shows the results in terms of the mismatch between the
optimal ADR value (that achieved by ESS policy) and the one
of the two addressed low complexity approaches, i.e.,
ADR
.
The performance of L-SMS varies from 31% to 35%, and
this demonstrates that L-SMS does not achieve performance
very close to the optimal value. Focusing on the proposed L-
eSMS, the
ADR
varies from a minimum value of 2% up to
a maximum value of 4.5%. This underlines that L-eSMS can
considerably improve the L-SMS approach in order to achieve
near-optimal performance.
Fig. 3 shows the comparison of the addressed policies in the
Scenario B. As shown in Fig. 3(a), CMS offers an ADR which
varies from 39 up to 260 Mbps. Again, the ESS guarantees
the highest ADR results. Focusing on the sub-optimal policies,
the L-SMS achieves an ADR which varies from 125 to 838
Mbps, whereas the ADR of L-eSMS increases from 130 up
to 1247 Mbps. Also in this scenario, L-eSMS outperforms the
L-SMS. Fig. 3(b) depicts the performance in terms of
ADR
of the two proposed near-optimal schemes. The performance
of L-SMS varies from 32% to 36%. Focusing on the proposed
L-eSMS, the
ADR
decreases from a maximum value of
30% up to a minimum value of 4.5%. It is worth noting
that
ADR
of L-SMS does not meaningfully vary as the
available channel bandwidth increases, whereas the one of
L-eSMS decreases when the number of RBs becomes large.
These results demonstrate that, also in the Scenario B, L-SMS
does not achieve performance very close to the optimal value
whereas the L-eSMS approach is well designed in order to
achieve near-optimal performance compared to L-SMS and the
gain is more evident when the number of available resources
is large.
VI. CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK
In this paper we addressed the design of resource allocation
schemes for multicast data delivery in LTE systems. We
focused on the subgrouping approach, tailored to overcome the
limitations of the conventional approaches while guaranteeing
system capacity maximization. We considered the issue to
reduce the computational burden in link adaptation procedures.
We proposed two low-complexity strategies, i.e., L-SMS and
L-eSMS, that efciently exploit the potentialities of LTE
in order to achieve better scalability than other approaches
proposed for OFDMA-based networks. Indeed, L-SMS and L-
eSMS guarantee a computational cost which is not inuenced
by the multicast group size and by the number of resources
available for MBMS session delivery. Through simulations,
the effectiveness of the proposed L-eSMS in achieving near-
optimal performance compared to schemes in literature is
underlined in different cell deployment and multicast group
conguration scenarios.
Future enhancement of this work is related to the design of a
novel low-complex subgrouping strategy tailored to decrease
the computational burden and to achieve performance more
close to the optimal one.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
The research of Massimo Condoluci is supported by Eu-
ropean Union, European Social Fund and Calabria Regional
Government. This paper reects the views only of the authors,
and the EU, and the Calabria Regional Government cannot
be held responsible for any use which may be made of the
information contained therein.
15 25 50 75 100
0
250
500
750
1000
1250
1500
A
D
R

[
M
b
p
s
]
Number of RBs


CMS
ESS
LSMS
LeSMS
(a) Aggregate Data Rate
15 25 50 75 100
0
20
40
60
80
100

A
D
R

[
%
]
Number of RBs

LSMS
LeSMS
(b)
ADR
Fig. 3. Simulation results in Scenario B.
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