Patent ID: 8537929

Claim:
A method for coding multicast information signals, the method comprising: determining indications of signal transformations imposed by communication links with a plurality of receivers that are grouped into subsets of receivers; generating a coding design by employing dimension parameters that are related to achievable capacity rates of the subsets of receivers and are determined by constraining a sum of the dimension parameters to be less than or equal to a dimension of a union of subspaces of signal values that are receivable by the receivers; generating output signals by applying the coding design to multicast information to compensate for the signal transformations; and transmitting the output signals to the plurality of receivers, wherein each dimension parameter is determined for a different subset of receivers, wherein each subspace of signal values corresponds to a different subset of receivers and denotes signal values that are receivable by receivers in a corresponding subset, and wherein the generating further comprises determining a reduced subspace for each of the subspaces such that the dimension of each reduced subspace is equal to the dimension parameter that corresponds to the subset to which the reduced subspace corresponds and such that a dimension of a union of the reduced subspaces is equal to the sum of the dimension parameters.