Patent ID: 8537693

Claim:
A method for transmitting multicast data on a wireless relay network comprising: associating relay stations into different subsets such that relay stations within a subset employ a cooperation mechanism to transmit multicast data on common transmission resources and employ a resource reuse mechanism to transmit the multicast data independently with respect to relay stations in other subsets; determining a schedule to allocate transmission resources to each subset and thereby implement the cooperation and resource reuse mechanisms; and transmitting the multicast data to users in accordance with the schedule; wherein the determining a schedule further comprises solving a scheduling problem formulated to maximize an aggregate flow for a plurality of multicast sessions wherein the determining a schedule further comprises solving the linear program (LP) relaxation of the scheduling problem in accordance with a contiguous permutation model to obtain a fractional channel allocation to each session of each subset; wherein the determining a schedule further comprises performing integral channel allocation for each subset; determining, for each subset, the loss of flow resulting from the integral channel allocation with respect to the solution of the LP relaxation; selecting and implementing the integral channel allocation for the subset yielding the lowest loss of flow; and updating the maximum flow limit for each session of the selected subset based on the implemented integral channel allocation.