On the Throughput Capacity of Opportunistic Multicasting with Erasure Codes

In this paper, we concentrate on opportunistic scheduling for multicast information. We pose the problem as a multicast throughput optimization problem. As a solution we present how one can jointly utilize fixed-rate and rateless erasure coding along with simple rate adaptation techniques in order to achieve the optimal multicast throughput per user. We first investigate the performance of the proposed system under i.i.d. channel conditions. Our analysis shows a linear gain for the multicast capacity over i.i.d. Rayleigh fading channels with respect to the number of users. Since the established results require coding over large number of blocks and hence induce large decoding delays, we extend our analysis to the cases where we code over shorter block lengths and thus quantify the delay-capacity tradeoffs under a simple setting. We further look into non-i.i.d. channel conditions and show achievable gains by modifying a scheduling heuristic whose fairness is well- established for opportunistic scheduling of unicast flows. Our overall evaluations demonstrate that under both i.i.d. and non-i.i.d. channel conditions, opportunistic multicasting with erasure coding can significantly improve the performance over the traditional techniques used in today's communication systems.