Multi-rate multicasting aided NOMA for addressing the multiuser diversity in beyond 5G

The envisaged fifth-generation (5G) and beyond networks offer unprecedented breakthroughs in media service delivery, stringent requirements, and challenging use cases. In such context, point-to-multipoint communications have proved to be highly efficient in delivering high-quality multimedia services over wireless networks. For the upcoming Beyond-5G (B5G) system releases, the Multicast/Broadcast Services (MBS) capability is an appealing feature that addresses the ever-growing traffic demands, disruptive multimedia services, massive connectivity, and low-latency applications. This paper addresses the multicast users’ channel quality diversity throughout multi-rate multicasting aided non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) over B5G MBS use cases. We propose a tailored radio resource management (RRM) strategy aided by K-Means subgrouping to deal with such diversity. We characterize and identify conditions for an effective coexistence of the benchmarks conventional multicast scheme (CMS) and subgrouping based on OMA (SOM) with the proposed subgrouping based on NOMA (SNOM). The proposed solution is assessed under a wide range of users’ distributions, throughput requirements, and network conditions of an MBS use case recreated through link-level millimeter-wave (mmWave) simulations.