Multicast Transmission Rate Selection Schemes Based on Network Coding in Wireless Networks

In a wireless multicast communication system, the channel state between each receiver and the specified source (i.e. base station) is different. Therefore, it will result in high delay with too high or too low multicast transmission rate at the source. Moreover, channel states will be varied with node mobility. In this case, multicast rate selection schemes only based on current Channel State Information (CSI) and received Data State Information (DSI) at receivers can not achieve the optimal performance. This paper proposes a multicast rate selection algorithm: Minimize Delay Combine with Prediction of channel states (MDCP) base on CSI and DSI at receivers to minimize transmission delay. Furthermore, MDCP uses network coding to improve the efficiency of data retransmissions. Simulation results show that MDCP can achieve 10%~20% delay gain over the multicast rate selection based the receiver with the worst channel state as well as the multicast rate selection based the receiver with the highest transmission delay and without the prediction of channel states.