Uniform MAC headers for synchronized MBMS transmission

MBMS (Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Service) is a service offered by 3GPP cellular networks for the distribution of multimedia content and can be transmitted by multiple base stations in a coordinated way such that signals from several base stations are perceived as one single signal at the user terminal. This requires synchronization of the radio interface on all layers so that all participating base stations have to apply the same transmission rules to the packets they obtain from the core network. These rules must be robust in the sense that synchronization is maintained even if some packets are not received by a base station. In this paper we propose a corresponding method that is capable of reliably accommodating the loss of an arbitrary number of consecutive packets even if statistical multiplexing is applied.