Patent ID: 8667359

Claim:
A method of scheduling and encoding data packets for transmission in a multicast session from a sender to a multicast group of receivers including at least two receivers in a multicast ARQ (Automatic Repeat reQuest) communication system for transfer of a given amount of multicast information, wherein the following steps are performed at each of a plurality of scheduling instances: obtaining feedback information from said at least two receivers indicating received data packets; forming at least one composite data packet as a weighted linear combination of regular data packets based on a corresponding weight vector comprising a set of coding weights; adapting, for each of said at least one composite data packet, said coding weights of said weight vector based on said feedback information such that, for each receiver of at least a set of said receivers, the weight vector will increase a rank of a receiver-specific matrix of weight vectors for previously received data packets if the weight vector is added to said matrix; and said sender transmitting said at least one composite data packet to those receivers of said multicast group that need to receive one or more multicast data packets.