Cooperative live video multicast for small cell base stations with overlapping coverage

Abstract

In this paper, we present a cooperative video multicast protocol for densely deployed small cells. We assume that the small cell Base Stations (BS) have overlapping coverages and they are allowed to have interfering transmissions. The proposed cooperative multicast protocol realizes a two-hop transmission system where each hop has its own time slot. In the first hop, the small cell base stations simultaneously transmit the packets to the relays who are also the users of multicast transmission. The relays then follow the optimal strategy under interference conditions and apply successive interference cancellation (SIC) decoding. In the second hop, the relays apply a Distributed Space Time Code (DSTC) that dynamically adapts itself based on the result of SIC and broadcast the result. This cooperative transmission scheme is complemented with application layer Forward Error Correction (FEC) in order to handle the remaining packet level losses. Through extensive simulations, we investigate the performance of the proposed scheme and show that the proposed protocol can efficiently handle inter-user interference, leading to superior performance over the state-of-The-Art purely orthogonal cooperative transmission schemes. © 2016 IEEE.