  Bandwidth hungry video content has become the dominant contributor to the
data traffic world over. Cellular networks are constantly evolving to meet the
growing traffic demands. Over the past few years, wireless multicast has been
garnering a lot of attention as a means of efficient resource utilization.
Multicast transmission lets spectral resources to be shared between users
streaming the same content. Even though multicast transmission allows to serve
multiple users on the same resources, in order to serve all these users
successfully, the base station cannot transmit the content at a rate greater
than that decodable by the user with the worst channel conditions. In this
paper, we propose a way to overcome this bottleneck. Video streaming services
can sustain a certain amount of packet loss without any significant degradation
in the quality experienced by the users. We leverage this loss tolerant nature
of video streaming applications to improve the performance of multicast video
services in LTE and 5G. We convert the problem of resource allocation for loss
tolerant multicasting into the problem of stabilizing a queueing system. We
then propose two throughput optimal Maximum Weight (MW) policies that
successfully stabilize the constructed queueing system. However, brute force
implementation of MW policies is mostly NP-hard. To overcome this, we propose a
maximum weight bipartite matching approach that results in a polynomial time
implementation of the proposed policies. We also evaluate the performance of
our policies via extensive simulations.
