In this paper, we propose a resource allocation scheme to minimize transmit power for multicast orthogonal frequency division multiple access systems. The proposed scheme allows users to have different symbol error rate (SER) across subcarriers and guarantees an average bit error rate and transmission rate for all users. We first provide an algorithm to determine the optimal bits and target SER on subcarriers. Because the worst-case complexity of the optimal algorithm is exponential, we further propose a suboptimal algorithm that separately assigns bit and adjusts SER with a lower complexity. Numerical results show that the proposed algorithm can effectively improve the performance of multicast orthogonal frequency division multiple access systems and that the performance of the suboptimal algorithm is close to that of the optimal one. OFDMA, MULTICAST 913 Figure 1. Multicast orthogonal frequency division multiple access transmissions. BS, base station.approach to this problem is to employ multiple-layer coding. Controlling the number of layers can provide the degree of freedom to satisfy different users [8,9]. Another approach is to use erasure coding for downlink transmissions. With this technology, the users only need to receive data from subcarriers with good channel conditions [10]. However, both approaches require source coding, which still places the computation burden at the transmitter. Moreover, the aforementioned works assume that users decode OFDM symbols independently from different subcarriers. However, if the transmitter can perform error control schemes across the subcarriers, the system performance can be further improved.In this paper, assuming that the error control scheme across subcarriers, such as bit interleaving, is performed at the base station (BS), we propose a resource allocation scheme to minimize the transmit power for multicast OFDMA systems. The proposed scheme allows users to have different symbol error rate (SER) on different subcarriers, while guaranteeing users' average bit error rate (BER) and data rate requirement. Here, we consider the case where the BS transmits data to all users on each subcarrier with single-layer coding, but the framework can also be extended to the multilayer coding [8] or erasure coding case [10]. We first present a full searching algorithm to obtain an optimal solution. In this optimal algorithm, we estimate the lower bound of the transmit power given the modulation level on each subcarrier to reduce computation. We then propose a suboptimal algorithm that separately performs bit loading and adjusts target SER on subcarriers with lower complexity. Simulation results show that the proposed transmission scheme outperforms the conventional multicast approach, as well as the multilayer approach at high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), and the performance of the suboptimal algorithm is close to that of the optimal one. The rest of the paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, we present a description of the multicast OFDMA system and formulate the optimizat...