Optimal Multicast Scheduling for Switched Beamforming Systems Leveraging Reflections

We consider the minimum-delay multicast scheduling problem for switched beamforming systems. A salient characteristic of mmWave links, reflection, is considered, which enables opportunistic reduction of data dissemination delay. We formulate the problem as a mixed integer nonlinear programming, which is difficult to solve directly. Instead, we decompose the problem into a set of subproblems, by allocating a fixed path to each receiver for data reception. The optimal solution to each subproblem has a contiguous structure, and hence can be computed using a dynamic programming-based approach. We propose an optimal algorithm for the original problem based on the solutions to the subproblems. By simulation we show the outperformance of our algorithm over an optimal multicast scheduling policy without leveraging reflections and a broadcast baseline scheme.