  This paper addresses a multi-criteria decision method properly designed to
effectively evaluate the most performing strategy for multicast content
delivery in Long Term Evolution (LTE) and beyond systems. We compared the
legacy conservative-based approach with other promising strategies in
literature, i.e., opportunistic multicasting and subgroup-based policies
tailored to exploit different cost functions, such as maximum throughput,
proportional fairness and the multicast dissatisfaction index (MDI). We provide
a comparison among above schemes in terms of aggregate data rate (ADR),
fairness and spectral efficiency. We further design a multi-criteria decision
making method, namely TOPSIS, to evaluate through a single mark the overall
performance of considered strategies. The obtained results show that the MDI
subgrouping strategy represents the most suitable approach for multicast
content delivery as it provides the most promising trade-off between the
fairness and the throughput achieved by the multicast members.
