A multicast publisher and method of establishing multicast scheduling are provided. The publisher determines a schedule for a multicast service that is selected from time slots of a schedule candidate. The schedule candidate is set by the publisher that initiates the multicast group. The multicast group is one-to-many or many-to-many. A response to a request for the service is transmitted to a subscriber and contains the multicast schedule. The response indicates whether the service is available for unicast transmission in addition to multicast. A schedule selection policy for other multicast publishers joining the multicast group specifies that the other multicast publishers are to follow the multicast schedule acquired when joining the multicast group, use the multicast schedule candidate to determine a multicast schedule, or are free to choose a multicast schedule.