Reliable multicast in LTE-A: An energy efficient cross-layer application of network coding

This paper presents a novel energy-aware communication scheme based on random network coding that is suitable for multicast and broadcast data delivery over Long Term Evolution (LTE) and LTE-Advanced networks. The proposed energy-aware transmission scheme minimises the average energy consumption of the macro base station that is required to deliver a message to all users in a multicast group in an LTE-A network. The energy saving gains and improved performance of the proposed scheme are compared to classical error control strategies. The reported analytical results clearly show a performance improvement of almost two-fold compared to the considered alternative.