A low-complexity and high-throughput multi-user diversity based multicast scheme for MANETs

We propose a new multicast access scheme that is founded on a metric that allows high-throughput multicast in MANETs. The new access metric, called MOST (as Maximum Opportunistic Scheduling scheme Throughput), is computed for each multicast session and utilized to find the optimal number of transmissions and the best set of transmission data rates to use in order to achieve the highest multicast session throughputs. The new multi-user diversity (MUD) [1] based multicast scheme exploits the wireless broadcast advantage feature [2] and the available channel capacities to get the transmission scheme that offers the highest multicast session throughput without need to know the throughput values of all other possible transmission schemes. The multicast scheme is modeled using a transition tree that is the basis of the metric calculation. This tree is exploited to minimize the number of capacity combinations to inspect before getting the best one. Results prove that the proposed access scheme based on MOST metric achieves throughputs visibly higher than the other proposed schemes.