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Multicasting is becoming more and more important in the Internet of Things (IoT) and wearable applications (e.g., high definition video streaming, virtual reality gaming, public safety, among others) that require high bandwidth efficiency and low energy consumption. In this regard, millimeter wave (mmWave) communications can play a crucial role to efficiently disseminate large volumes of data as well as to enhance the throughput gain in fifth-generation (5G) and beyond networks. There are, however, challenges to face in view of providing multicast services with high data rates under the conditions of short propagation range caused by high path loss at mmWave frequencies. Indeed, the strong directionality required at extremely high frequency bands excludes the possibility of serving all multicast users via a single transmission. Therefore, multicasting in directional systems consists of a sequence of beamformed transmissions to serve all multicast group members, subgroup by subgroup. This paper focuses on multicast data transmission optimization in terms of throughput and, hence, of the energy efficiency of resource-constrained devices such as wearables, running their resource-hungry applications. In particular, we provide a means to perform the beam switching and propose a radio resource management (RRM) policy that can determine the number and width of the beams required to deliver the multicast content to all interested users. Achieved simulation results show that the proposed RRM policy significantly improves network throughput with respect to benchmark approaches. It also achieves a high gain in energy efficiency over unicast and multicast with fixed predefined beams. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To date, group-oriented communications have been mainly exploited for delivering multimedia services in human-oriented communications while, in future fifth generation (5G) cellular networks, objects will be the main target. Internet of Things (IoT) will undoubtedly play a key role in 5G networks, wherein massive machine-type communications (mMTC) feature a use case as crucial as challenging since cellular IoT connections are predicted to grow heavily in the next future. To boost capacity and energy efficiency, the 5G network can leverage device-to-device (D2D) communications which are recognized as an effective offloading technique. This is achieved thanks to the fact that, in legacy D2D communications, data are directly sent from one device to another, avoiding the crossing of the network. Obviously, the distributed nature of such a communication paradigm and the inherent broadcast nature of the wireless channel make it necessary to think how to secure the so called “sidelink” transmissions. This work proposes a protocol for the efficient and reliable management of multicast services in a 5G-oriented IoT scenario, in which security is a crucial requirement to be met. The proposed protocol is tailored to Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) and makes use of D2D communications with the aim of improving network efficiency and optimizing network resource utilization. In addition, cyber security and social trustworthiness mechanisms are exploited to secure D2D communications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The number and variety of mobile multicast applications are growing at an unprecedented and unanticipated pace. Mobile network providers are in front of a dramatic increase in multicast traffic load, and this growth is forecasted to continue in fifth-generation (5G) networks. The major challenges come from the fact that multicast traffic not only targets groups of end-user devices; it also involves machine-type communications (MTC) for the Internet of Things (IoT). The increase in the MTC load, predicted for 5G, calls into question the effectiveness of the current multimedia broadcast multicast service (MBMS). The aim of this paper is to provide a survey of 5G challenges in the view of effective management of multicast applications, and to identify how to enhance the mobile network architecture to enable multicast applications in future 5G scenarios. By accounting for the presence of both human and machine-related traffic, strengths and weaknesses of the state-of-the-art achievements in multicasting are critically analyzed to provide guidelines for future research on 5G networks and more conscious design choices. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Multimedia content delivery over satellite systems is considered as a promising service in emerging 5G networks. The aim of this paper is to design a novel radio resource management algorithm for efficiently managing multicast multimedia content transmission over satellite network. The proposed approach performs the spectrum management on a per-group basis, by splitting multicast terminals into different subgroups according to the experienced channel qualities. We demonstrate that subgrouping policy defined by the authors as multicast subgrouping-maximum satisfaction index (MS-MSI), based on a new metric (i.e., MSI), overcomes the weakness of the previous techniques proposed in the literature and provides the best tradeoff between user throughput and fairness. As a further result, we demonstrate that MS-MSI is robust to the long propagation delay of satellite links. An extensive simulation campaign has been conducted by considering several satellite environments. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]