Joint Power Allocation and Adaptive Random Network Coding in Wireless Multicast Networks

It is known that random network coding (RNC) can be used to improve the performance of wireless multicast networks. However, in the delay sensitive applications, no useful information can be recovered if a user cannot collect a full set of the encoded packets. This becomes more severe for multicast hard deadline constrained prioritized data because of the delivery time limitation and packet interdependency. Meanwhile, the performance of a multicast network is also limited by its bottleneck user(s) due to the heterogeneity of the underlying physical channels. Accordingly, we propose a cross-layer transmission scheme that utilizes beamforming at physical layer and adaptive RNC (ARNC) at network layer to maximize the overall network throughput. Under this joint-design, a smart antennas array that operates the beamforming is used to dynamically allocate the transmitting power among users, and the ARNC is adopted to achieve the network coding gain. In this way, the performance of each user is well balanced and the overall network throughput is increased observably. Furthermore, we propose a sample-based feedback scheme to reduce the system overhead. The analytical and simulation results are shown that the throughput of the network has increased by 30%~40% under our schemes compared with other RNC-based schemes.