A hybrid unicast-multicast utility-based network selection algorithm

There is significant research and development effort put to find the best trade-off between quality and energy consumption when delivering video in a heterogeneous wireless network environment. Among the different solutions are network selection schemes which allow user devices the option to select the network which best addresses its service needs. This paper goes a step further and proposes a Hybrid Unicast-Multicast utility-based Network Selection algorithm (HUMANS), which offers the additional option of selecting multicast transmissions in the network selection process. Testing of users in both low- and high-density scenarios has demonstrated that HUMANS outperforms other solutions in terms of outage percentage, resource utilization and average quality of transmission as well as achieves more efficient resource utilization. This is done by serving users with good channel conditions via unicast transmissions and the ones with poor channel quality conditions via multicast.