A Cross-Layer View of Wireless Multicasting Under Uncertainty

In this paper, the authors study the problem of scheduling through rate and power control for multi-cast traffic. Their objective is to maximize the total user utility where user utilities are measured in terms of the long term average received rates. Considering the fact that accurate knowledge of the wireless channel conditions may not be always available, they focus on policies that take decisions based only on inaccurate estimates of the wireless channel state. They introduce an on-line, stationary scheduling and rate control policy. They establish its optimality among all policies with the same knowledge regarding the current channel state through stochastic approximation arguments.