Comparison of Schemes for Streaming Multicast in Cellular Networks with Relays

Multicasting is emerging as an important application in both cellular networks and wireless sensor networks. We consider several schemes for enhancing throughput and coverage for streaming multicast sessions by allowing intermediate nodes to relay information from the source. The schemes exploit the broadcast nature of the wireless medium, and techniques such as received signal combining and network coding to enhance performance while guaranteeing that a constant streaming delay is experienced by every user. The performance metric used for comparison is the throughput achieved at a given area coverage probability. Specifically, we study techniques such as decode-and-forward, amplify-and-forward, and pipelining and compare their performances through simulations in the context of a cellular network with relays and show that significant performance benefits are obtained through such schemes.