Abstract
In the past decade, we have witnessed a transformation of our lifestyle. In the early 2000s, we were physically engaged with our daily routine. But nowadays, we use our smartphones nearly for everything. It helps us to keep up with our friends on Facebook, to talk to them on WhatsApp, to buy what we love on Amazon, to book a hotel for our next trip on Booking.com, to find our route on Waze, to listen to music on Spotify, etc. This new lifestyle has created an unprecedented amount of mobile data traffic. In 2017, our smartphones created 11 Exabytes of data traffic per month and this will reach 35 Exabytes by 2020. A considerable portion of this huge amount of mobile data traffic is related to the contents and applications that are of interest for groups of users in the network rather than a specific user. For example, software download and software updating have created 649 Petabytes of traffic per month in 2017, and this amount will increase to 1467 Petabytes by 2020. Other examples of such common contents and applications of interest are live broadcast of sporting events, news headlines, mobile TV, and popular (hot) videos. This has initiated a massive interest in multicast transmission in the next generation of cellular networks, 5G. As massive MIMO is a fundamental part of 5G and has proved its superb energy and spectral efficiency, massive MIMO multicasting is a promising candidate for mul-ticast transmission. However, in order to make it happen, there are grand challenges that should be resolved. The first challenge is the high computational complexity of the existing multicast transmission algorithms, which makes them impractical for massive MIMO systems. The second challenge is the channel state information acquisition. The third challenge is the coexistence of unicast and multicast transmission, and finally, the last challenge is the high cost of large-scale antenna transmitters. In this thesis, we address all the aforementioned challenges for multicast transmis-sion in massive MIMO systems. Moreover, we present a guideline for multicasting in these systems. This guideline will enable the cellular network designers to adjust their systems according to their requirements. Finally, we show that massive MIMO multicasting not only is viable but also it is necessary if we want to keep up with ever-increasing mobile data traffic.