Cooperative layered video multicast using randomized distributed space time codes

With the increased popularity of mobile multimedia services, efficient and robust video multicast strategies are of critical importance. In a conventional multicast system, the source station transmits at the base rate of the underlying network so that all the nodes can receive the data correctly. The performance of such a multicast system is limited by the node with the worst channel conditions, which usually corresponds to the nodes at the edge of the multicast coverage range. To overcome this problem, we propose a two-hop cooperative transmission scheme where in the first hop the source station transmits the packets and the nodes who receive the packets forward the packets simultaneously in the second hop using Randomized Distributed Space Time Codes (R-DSTC). We further integrate this randomized cooperative transmission with layered video coding to provide users different video quality based on their channel conditions. The performance of the system is evaluated and compared with a conventional multicast system. Our results show that the proposed cooperative system significantly improves the performance compared to conventional multicast.