Adaptive Network Coded MIMO Schemes for Group Reliable Multicast Green Communications

Green communications have a growing expansion to efficiently reduce energy consumption in wireless networks and to extend the battery life in portable devices. The paper proposes a joint Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) antennas configurations and Network Coding (NC) scheme for energy saving purpose. Starting from the analysis of the reliability gain of NC for a multicast scenario proposed by Ghaderi et alii, the proposed approach leads towards the optimization of an integrated MIMO-NC system by considering a trade-off between overall complexity and performance. In particular, we optimize jointly the delivery delay of the information flow to a group of users and the number of used receive antennas to decrease energy consumption at the receiver. This goal is achieved by minimizing a suitable objective function derived by assuming that each node of the broadcast/multicast group has to be able to decode the information flow with a target probability, depending on the propagation conditions, the block and packet length, the number of interested users and the number of receive antennas. Numerical results are presented with the aim of highlighting the advantages of the proposed optimized MIMO-NC scheme in comparison with the classic solution.