A constant approximation for multicast scheduling under physical interference model

In this paper, we study the maximum multicast set scheduling problem in a plane wireless network under the physical interference model. Specifically, from a given set of multicast transmissions, select a maximum set of multicast transmissions with largest sum of receivers, where each receiver of a multicast transmission is interference-free from other transmissions subject to the physical interference constraint. This problem is known to be NP-hard and in this paper we develop an approximation algorithm with constant approximation bound guarantee. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first multicast scheduling algorithm under the physical interference model. For ease of implementation in distributed settings, we focus on the problem in an oblivious power assignment setting.