Distance-Based Multicast Scheduling for mmWave Networks Leveraging Reflections

We investigate the minimum-delay multicast scheduling problem for mmWave networks by fully leveraging reflections. An analog beamforming system is considered, where both the orientation and beamwidth of the transmission beam can be adjusted to serve multiple receivers simultaneously. We formulate a combinatorial optimization problem that is difficult to solve directly. To address this challenge, we propose a polynomial-time algorithm that heuristically selects multicast groups based on the distances between receivers. Simulation results demonstrate that, despite lower complexity, the proposed algorithm achieves significant delay reduction compared to baseline approaches and performs close to optimal, with performance gains that increase with the number of reflected paths, showing good scalability.