Wireless video multicast in tactical environments

There has been a tremendous increase in demand for real-time video applications over military networks. Multicast provides an efficient solution for simultaneous content delivery to a group of users. It is especially valuable for military applications, as it saves network resources by sharing the data streams across receivers. Even with ever increasing channel bandwidth and computation power, efficiently multicasting video over the tactical edge is still challenging due to factors such as higher packet loss ratio, bandwidth variations and the heterogeneity of the users. In this paper, we explore the use of omni-directional relays to improve the performance of wireless video multicast in tactical environments. We focus on assessing the trade-off between total relay energy, coverage area and video quality. The results provide achievable operational regions, which can serve as a reference and a starting point for system design.