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In this article, we design, analyze and implement a network coding based scheme for the problem of transmitting multiple unicast streams from a single access point to multiple receivers. In particular, we consider the scenario in which an access point has access to infinite streams of data to be distributed to their intended receivers. After each time slot, the access point receives acknowledgments on previous transmissions. Based on the acknowledgements, it decides on the structure of a coded or uncoded packet to be broadcast to all receivers in the next slot. The goal of the access point is to maximize the cumulative throughput or discounted cumulative throughput in the system. We first rigorously model the relevant coding problem and the information available to the access point and the receivers. We then formulate the problem using a Markov decision process with an infinite horizon, analyze the value function under the uncoded and coded policies and, despite the exponential number of states, devise greedy and semi-greedy policies with a running time which is polynomial with high probability. We then analyze the two users case in more detail and show the optimality of the semi-greedy policy in that case. Finally, we describe a simple implementation of the suggested concepts within a WiFi open-source driver. The implementation performs the network coding such that the enhanced WiFi architecture is transparent above the MAC layer.

Consider the problem of a Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) Multiple-Access Channel (MAC) at the limit of large number of users. Clearly, in practical scenarios, only a small subset of the users can be scheduled to utilize the channel simultaneously. Thus, a problem of user selection arises. However, since solutions which collect Channel State Information (CSI) from all users and decide on the best subset to transmit in each slot do not scale when the number of users is large, distributed algorithms for user selection are advantageous.In this paper, we analyse a distributed user selection algorithm, which selects a group of users to transmit without coordinating between users and without all users sending CSI to the base station. This threshold-based algorithm is analysed for both Zero-Forcing (ZF) and Minimum Mean Square Error (MMSE) receivers, and its expected sum-rate in the limit of large number of users is investigated. It is shown that for large number of users it achieves the same scaling laws as the optimal centralized scheme.

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