Improving Multicast Networks Throughput via Joint Multicast Beamforming and Rate Aware Instantly Decodable Network Coding

The throughput of multicast networks depends not only on the transmission rate, but also on the number of receivers simultaneously served by the transmit signal. In this letter, we develop a cross-layer approach based on joint multicast beamforming and rate aware instantly decodable network coding (J-MB-RA-IDNC), where instantly decodable network coding (IDNC) is employed at the network layer to increase the number of receivers to be served simultaneously, multicast beamforming is used at the physical layer to direct the beam toward the targeted receivers of the selected rate aware IDNC (RA-IDNC) schedule to improve the transmission rate. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed scheme.