Topology management and outage optimization for multicasting over slowly fading multiple access networks

•We propose a distributed rate allocation scheme for multicasting with network coding.•The network is modeled as a collection of slow Rayleigh fading MACs.•The rate allocation scheme is based solely on the statistics of the channels.•An upper bound is presented for the probability of outage in the fading MAC.•The distributed rate allocation scheme is aimed at minimizing the outage probability.

This paper examines the problem of rate allocation for multicasting over slow Rayleigh fading channels using network coding. In the proposed model, the network is treated as a collection of Rayleigh fading multiple access channels. In this model, rate allocation scheme that is based solely on the statistics of the channels is presented. The rate allocation scheme is aimed at minimizing the outage probability. An upper bound is presented for the probability of outage in the fading multiple access channel. A suboptimal solution based on this bound is given. A distributed primal–dual gradient algorithm is derived to solve the rate allocation problem.