  Multimedia traffic is predicted to account for 82% of the total data traffic
by the year 2020. With the increasing popularity of video streaming
applications like YouTube, Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, popular video content
is often required to be delivered to a large number of users simultaneously.
Multicast transmission can be used for catering to such applications
efficiently. The common content can be transmitted to the users on the same
resources resulting in considerable resource conservation. This paper proposes
various schemes for efficient grouping and resource allocation for multicast
transmission in LTE. The optimal grouping and resource allocation problems are
shown to be NP-hard and so, we propose heuristic algorithms for both these
problems. We also formulate a Simulated Annealing based algorithm to
approximate the optimal resource allocation for our problem. The LP-relaxation
based resource allocation proposed by us results in allocations very close to
the estimated optimal.
