Enhanced cooperative source diversity for multicast services with heterogeneous coverage

The achievable transmission rate of the multicast services is in general limited by the worst case mobile users within the multicast service sectors. Yet, unlike relay-assisted unicast service, there is a unique challenge in applying relay to multicast service. To be more specific, the multicast service shall be able to provide a uniform treatment for the mobile users within and without the relay coverage, which is known as the heterogeneous coverage issue. In this paper, a novel cooperative source diversity scheme is proposed to address the above issue. Compared with direct transmission and conventional cooperative source diversity scheme, the proposed approach achieves better link-layer performance in terms of packet error rate (PER) and system-level performance in terms of average spectrum efficiency and hence has practical design importance.