PERFORMANCE OF COOPERATIVE MULTICASTING WIRELESS NETWORKS

Abstract

Next generation wireless networks are expected to support several bandwidth expensive multimedia applications, e.g., distance learning, video conferences etc., which are inherently multicast in nature. Group communication is supported by several specialized wireless ad-hoc networks, sensor networks, disaster recovery networks and military communications. In wireless ad-hoc network environments, every link is wireless and every node is mobile. The mobility and wireless features of wireless ad-hoc network make data lost easily as well as multicasting inefficient and unreliable. Moreover, efficient and reliable multicast in wireless ad-hoc network is a difficult issue. The concept of cooperation in communications has drawn a lot of research attention in recent years due to its potential to improve the efficiency and reliability of wireless networks.

This thesis focuses on the performance study of the cooperative multicasting wireless networks employing decode and forward (DF) protocol. We study the outage probability performance of DF protocol using maximum ratio combining technique. We also developed a relay selection method. In the developed relay selection technique there are many candidate nodes for the selection, but the node which will give good outage performance result of multicasting wireless network would be selected.