Cellular-Based Real-Time Flow Repair for Broadcast Flows

Watching television on a portable device is possible on broadcast and cellular systems. With broadcast technologies, due to the absence of a feedback channel it is not possible to guarantee an error free reception at the receivers. With cellular technologies, the transmission is based on unicast and the same content is transmitted as many times as the number of people who are watching the same program in the cell. We propose to combine both technologies and consider the concept of repairing a broadcast data flow for dual-mode (cellular and broadcast) smartphones in real time in order to ensure a better quality of service. We propose to use the constrained application protocol (CoAP) and specify a real-time flow repair (RFR) service based on CoAP in the cellular networks. We describe the architecture to provide such a service. We analyze the load generated in the cellular radio access network due to the retransmission of the packets lost on the broadcast system and also develop a model for the evaluation of the residual errors in the RFR operations.