Title: Stochastic control strategies for MAC layer wireless multicast

Bandwidth and energy-efficiency of multicast can be substantially
improved by exploiting the feature that a single transmission can be
intercepted by several receivers at the MAC layer. The multicast nature
of transmissions, however, changes the fundamental relations between the
QoS parameters, throughput, stability and loss, e.g., a strategy that
maximizes the throughput does not necessarily maximize the stability
region or minimize the packet loss. The design of efficient transmission
strategies needs the resolution of decision problems and protocol
challenges that are not encountered in wireline or wireless unicast or
even in wireline multicast. We explore the trade-offs between the QoS
parameters, and present optimal transmission strategies that provably
maximize the throughput subject to stability, loss and delay
constraints. The optimal strategies are adaptive, online, and
easy-to-implement, yet attain the same performance as optimal offline
and static strategies that assume in their decision process the
knowledge of future packet arrivals and channel conditions.
We present MAC protocols that implement the optimal strategies. We
demonstrate using analysis, numerical performance evaluation and
simulation that the MAC protocols significantly outperform the existing
approaches.