Cooperative Retransmission for Reliable Wireless Multicast Services

Multicast services have been identified as an important key technology to increase the network and service providers’ revenue. Many data dissemination applications require even reliable multicast. Error/loss recovery for reliable multicast is different from conventional schemes taking into consideration the unreliable wireless channel, the battery driven mobile device, and the limited wireless bandwidth.

To have an efficient error/loss recovery scheme for reliable multicast in wireless networks, we advocate a new communication architecture. It is referred to as cooperative wireless networking, where the mobile devices communicate directly with each other to perform retransmissions using their short-range communication capabilities in addition to their cellular links.

Based on the cooperative architecture a novel retransmission scheme is proposed exploiting the short-range retransmission in this chapter. In the state-of-the-art, the non-cooperative error recovery strategies are compared with the cooperative retransmission strategy in terms of mobile device energy consumption to show the benefit of the newly introduced scheme.