A Novel Cooperative Multicast Scheme Based on Fountain Code

Multicast is an efficient way to support emerging multimedia services over wireless network. Fountain codes are used in multicast systems to enable a robust transmission without CSI feedback and ARQ. We propose a cooperative multicast scheme based on fountain code to improve the performance of multicast. The users are coordinated with each other to decode the message at different time slots within the data transmission of a multicast session. Specifically, we take the local channel state information (CSI) and the local residual energy information (REI) into consideration, and apply a relay-selection and power-allocation strategy in our cooperative multicast scheme to prolong the network lifetime, while keeping the transmission delay as low as possible. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme can achieve a good tradeoff between transmission delay and network lifetime.