Multicast Streaming over 3G Cellular Networks through Multi-channel Transmissions: Proposals and Performance Evaluation

In this paper, we propose a novel technique for the provisioning of multicast streaming flows in 3G W-CDMA cellular systems. Our focus here is on the transmission of a downlink multicast streaming flow to the interested users in a 3G cell. For error control, we propose packet-based forward error correction (FEC) and with the transmission of a certain amount of redundancy over parallel common channels. In practice, we exploit the temporal diversity over multiple channels to strengthen the FEC scheme thereby increasing the QoS. To increase error resilience, in every channel we exploit well-known packet-based Reed Solomon like coding techniques. Moreover, appropriate time shifts of the information sent across the parallel common channels are also introduced to increase the robustness against error bursts. The performance evaluation is carried out through an analytical framework. The obtained results show the substantial benefits deriving from the usage of a multiple channel transmission technique.