Space-Time Coded Cooperative Multicasting with Maximal Ratio Combining and Incremental Redundancy

The performance of wireless multicasting is negatively affected by multipath fading. To improve reliability, cooperation among the nodes of the network can be used to create spatial diversity. This paper analyzes a two phase, space-time coded, cooperative multicast protocol and investigates two transmission and combination strategies: Maximal Ratio Combining and Incremental Redundancy. Moreover, it addresses two different channel state information (CSI) scenarios: i) no transmit CSI within the network and ii) broadcast transmit CSI at the source.