Network Coding for Multicasting over Rayleigh Fading Multi Access Channels

This paper examines the problem of rate allocation for multicasting over slow Rayleigh fading channels using network coding. In the proposed model, the network is treated as a collection of Rayleigh fading multiple access channels. In this model, rate allocation schemes that are based solely on the statistics of the channels are presented. The schemes are aimed to minimize the outage probability. An upper bound is presented for the probability of outage in the fading MAC. A suboptimal solution based on this bound is given for the MAC network model. We also consider outage probability minimization for TDMA schemes for the multiple access channels.