On Maximizing the Throughput of Opportunistic Multicast in Wireless Cellular Networks with Erasure Codes

In this paper, we discuss the opportunistic multicast scheduling (OMS) in a wireless network using erasure codes. Originally proposed for channels with erasures such as internet, erasure codes are found useful in wireless multicast to achieve better tradeoff between multiuser diversity and the multicast gain. In this work we investigated how to design an opportunistic multicast scheduling scheme which can efficiently improve the per user throughput capacity in a wireless network using erasure codes. Aiming at maximize the throughput, we proposed a maximal OMS (M-OMS) scheme which is inspired by the unicast maximal opportunistic scheduling. We build a system model and provide theoretical analysis on proposed M-OMS scheme. The proposed scheme shows substantial improvement over existing fixed selection ratio opportunistic multicast scheduling schemes (F-OMS).