Modeling and analysis of applying adaptive modulation coding in wireless multicast and broadcast systems

Traditional wireless communications only utilize fixed-rate multicast and broadcast. In other words, only the most robust modulation and coding scheme can be applied for data transmission. Such a scheme fails to sufficiently exploit the potential gains of multicast and broadcast, resulting in bandwidth waste. To overcome such a problem, investigating the rate adaptation of multicast and broadcast wireless systems is the primary task. Unlike the traditional wireless systems, this paper presents an analytical model with rate adaptation for both multicast and broadcast. Adaptive modulation and coding are applied to achieve rate adaptation. We construct a stochastic model by using Finite State Markov chains for the multicast broadcast system modeling. The model’s outputs are shown to approximate to the results of our system level simulations. The model derives the performance of rate adaptation in multicast and broadcast. With the deduced modeling results, we can predict the system throughput providing the channel states, and the modulation and coding schemes variations.