A layer 2 multicast with improved reliability over the TDMA cellular radio networks

This paper proposes a class of layer 2 multicast protocols with improved transmission reliability over TDMA cellular radio networks. The improvement is achieved by utilizing ARQ in the multicast transmission stream. This paper is focused on the layer 2, i.e. the link level multicast. In this paper, the authors introduce an ARQ method, the so called modified round robin (MRR), which is throughput efficient when the number of listeners is large. Numerical comparisons based on simulations under typical land mobile communication environments are also presented. The authors then propose a way to adapt MRR to typical TDMA cellular radio networks. The authors show that, by properly setting the parameters, MRR is well adapted to TDMA based cellular radio networks, and achieves efficient use of the frequency spectrum.