Optimal Throughput for Reliability and Stability in Wireless Multicast Communication

Multicast communications can help to transmit traffic efficiently to target groups of interested users without extra bandwidth or power resources. However, compared to unicast transmission, multicast over wireless channels does not support reliable transmission due to limitation of the message overhead. In this paper, we study the problem of how to guarantee reliability while maintaining the maximum throughput in multicast communication. We propose a two-step policy to characterize the throughput-optimization problem with the reliability constraints of multicast communication. In the first step, we allocate a transmission rate to each group in order to guarantee the reliability constraint and to maximize the throughput of each group. In the second step, we assign indicator functions to the multicast group with the maximum throughput. The simulation results highlight the benefits of our approach to guarantee the reliability and maximize the throughput in multicast communications.