An adaptive strategy for maximizing throughput in MAC layer wireless multicast

Bandwidth efficiency of wireless multicast can be improved sub-stantially by exploiting the fact that several receivers can be reached at the MAC layer by a single transmission. The multicast nature of the transmissions, however, introduces several design challenges, and systematic design approaches that have been used effectively in unicast and wireline multicast do not apply in wireless multicast. For example, a transmission policy that maximizes the stability re-gion of the network need not maximize the network throughput. Therefore, the objective is to design a policy that decides when a sender should transmit in order to maximize the system throughput subject to maintaining the system stability. We present a sufficient condition that can be used to establish the throughput optimality of a stable transmission policy. We subsequently design an adaptive stable policy that allows a sender to decide when to transmit usin