Bulk data multicast rate scheduling for hybrid heterogeneous satellite-terrestrial networks

We study a long-term, end-to-end rate scheduling problem of multicasting a large bulk file over a hybrid satellite-terrestrial network to heterogeneous receivers. With selected receivers periodically reporting their long-term packet survival probabilities at each of the sender's transmission rates, we create a system which is both capable of trading off bandwidth consumption and receiver latency through a control parameter and proactively maintaining a certain degree of reliable delivery. To increase bandwidth efficiency, we assume forward error correction (FEC) in the form of the Reed Solomon erasure (RSE) coding. As an exact solution is computationally costly, we develop a rate scheduling algorithm based on a Gaussian approximation and study its performance by simulations.