Macro Diversity Coding for Broadcast and Multicast Services in a Coded OFDM Cellular System

Recently, broadcast and multicast services are introduced in cellular networks to deliver multimedia contents efficiently with limited wireless resources. To provide such services more reliably at the cell boundary, we propose a macro diversity coding method for an OFDM cellular system. In the method, cells are divided into multiple cell groups and a coded packet is partitioned into the subblocks for which different cell group combinations are assigned to transmit two diversity branches of a transmit diversity code. Thus, the service data rate is increased at the same transmit power due to the channel diversity of each transmit symbol and coding diversity obtained by different fading statistics over the subblocks