Cooperative Multicast for Mobile IPTV Over Wireless Mesh Networks: The Relay-Selection Study

Recently, there has been growing interest in Internet Protocol television (IPTV) technologies from both academic and industrial communities. To meet this trend, we study the mobile IPTV deployment across wireless mesh networks (WMNs) in this paper. IPTV services require the support of reliable multicast to ensure stable packet transmission across WMNs. In this paper, we employ multicast cooperative communications to achieve this goal. Specifically, we first identify the relay selection as a critical issue for cooperative multicast; we then develop the concept of in-group/out-group cooperation, as well as a distributed relay-selection algorithm for the mobile computing environment. Extensive simulation results show that our approach can efficiently mitigate multicast transmission errors and guarantee reliable IPTV data delivery in a wireless environment.