Abstract: This paper presents a novel subcarrier combining based multicast resource scheduling algorithm for wireless OFDM multicast systems. By dividing subcarriers into different groups in advance, the algorithm avoids invalid subcarrier pairing, and adaptively chooses the optimal scheme between subcarrier diversity and subcarrier multiplexing by deciding whether to combine subcarriers or not. Moreover, according to the characteristic of subcarrier power allocation, this scheme decouples the problem into two sub-problems of intra-subcarrier-pairing power allocation and inter-subcarrier-pairing power allocation, which further improves the performance of the system. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme properly improves the system performance with lower complexity compared with the existing schemes.