Cooperative wireless multicast: Performance analysis and power/location optimization

The popularity of multimedia multicast/broadcast applications over wireless networks makes it critical to address the error-prone, heterogeneous and dynamically changing nature of wireless channels. A promising solution to combat channel fading is to explore the cooperative diversity in which users may help each other forward packets. This paper investigates cooperative multicast schemes that use a maximal ratio combiner to enhance the received signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), and provides a thorough performance analysis. Two relay selection schemes are considered: the distributed and the genie-aided cooperation schemes. We derive the closed-form formulation and the approximations of their average outage probabilities.We also analyze the optimal power allocation and relay location strategies, and show that allocating half of the total transmission power to the source minimizes the average outage probability. Our analysis and simulation results show that cooperative multicast gives better performance when more relays help forward signals. Cooperative multicast helps achieve diversity order 2, and user cooperation can significantly reduce the outage probability, especially in the high SNR region. Finally, we compare the two cooperation strategies, and show that distributed cooperative multicast is preferred since it achieves a lower outage probability without introducing extra overhead for control messages.