Reliable Multicasting for Device-to-Device Radio Underlaying Cellular Networks

This paper proposes Leader in Charge (LiC), a reliable multicast architecture for device-to-device (D2D) radio underlaying cellular networks. The multicast-requesting user equipments (UEs) in close proximity form a D2D cluster to receive the multicast packets through cooperation. In addition to receiving the multicast packets from the eNB, UEs share what they received from the multicast on short-range links among UEs, namely the D2D links, to exploit the wireless resources a more efficient way. Consequently, we show that utilizing the D2D links in cellular networks increases the throughput of a multicast session by means of simulation. We also discuss some practical issues facing the integration of LiC into the current cellular networks. In particular, we propose efficient delay control mechanism to reduce the average and maximum delay experienced by LiC users, which is further confirmed by the simulation results.