Multicast throughput subject to delay in multi-rate wireless networks

Abstract

Exploiting multi-user diversity (MUD) means to assign the resources to the user experiencing the best channel conditions. When multicast communication is considered, MUD means that a sender can serve the intended receiver users using one or many data transmission rates. In fact, MUD-based multicast schemes aiming to maximize the multicast throughput (e.g. DOMS and MOST) or to minimize the multicast delay (e.g. EMTT) are shown to significantly outperform other multicast schemes. In this paper, we suggest a distributed, stateless and multi-user diversity-based multicast scheme; the Multicast scheme for Opportunistic Throughput subject to Delay (MOTD), which is utilized to study the intrinsic trade-off between the multicast throughput and the multicast delay in multi-rate networks. Then, we study the performance of the previously mentioned multicast schemes and we compare them to MOTD. The evaluated features are the throughput and the transmission delay. Mainly, MOTD registers very good throughput values that are constrained by moderated transmission delays.