Design and Performance Evaluation of Cooperative Retransmission Scheme for Reliable Multicast Services in Cellular Controlled P2P Networks

Reliable multicast applications such as software distribution, data distribution and replication and mailing list delivery, etc. [1] are getting more and more interests from network and service providers. The conventional error/loss recovery schemes are not efficient when they are applied to multicast scenarios in wireless networks. The reason lies in the unreliable wireless channel, the limited wireless bandwidth and resource, the battery powered wireless devices, and others. To have an effective error/loss recovery scheme for reliable multicast in wireless networks, we advocate a new communication architecture. It is referred to as cellular controlled peer-to- peer network, where the mobile devices communicate directly with each other to perform cooperative 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 paper. The state of the art, the non-cooperative error recovery schemes (e.g., ARQ, Layered FEC and Integrated FEC II) and the proposed scheme are compared with each other in terms of energy consumption to show the benefit of the newly introduced scheme.