Index Policies for Real-Time Multicast Scheduling for Wireless Broadcast Systems

Motivated by the increasing usage of wireless broadcast networks for multicast real-time applications like video, this paper considers a canonical real-time multicast scheduling problem for a wireless broadcast LAN. A wireless Access Point (AP) has N latency-sensitive flows, each associated with a deadline and a multicast group of receivers that desire to receive all the packets successfully by their corresponding deadlines. The authors consider periodic and one-shot models of real-time arrivals. The channel from the AP to each receiver is a wireless erasure channel, independent across users and slots.