Efficient and reliable multicast in multi-radio networks

This paper investigates a novel efficient approach to utilize multiple radio interfaces for enhancing the performance of reliable multicasts from a single sender to a group of receivers. In the proposed scheme, one radio channel (and interface) is dedicated only for recovery information transmissions. We apply this concept to both ARQ and hybrid ARQ+FEC protocols, formally analyzing the number of packets each receiver needs to process in both our approach and in the common single channel approach. We also present a corresponding efficient protocol, and study its performance by simulation. Both the formal analysis and the simulations demonstrate the benefits of our scheme.