A novel unequal error protection (UEP) scheme using D-STTD for multicast service

To significantly enhance the spectral efficiency of the MBS service, UEP and MIMO are important core technologies to realize such challenging goal. Taking into account of the implementation constraints, 4 times 2 is widely accepted as a reasonable MIMO setup and is a mandatory configuration of the next generation wireless systems. Within the 4 times 2 MIMO configuration, D-STTD is an important transmission scheme which strikes a balance between spatial diversity and spatial multiplexing and it can achieve better performance than VBLAST. Traditional approaches focus on different ways to introduce UEP in single antenna systems. However, it is difficult to apply the conventional schemes in the D-STTD systems since the decoding error is mainly contributed by the spatial interference between different streams. In this paper, we shall propose a novel UEP scheme for MBS services using D-STTD in 4times2 MIMO systems and formulate a general design framework to determine various parameters of the proposed UEP scheme. For illustration, we give two examples on the determination of the UEP parameters for the uncoded UEP design and the coded UEP design. From the results, we found that the proposed UEP scheme can achieve significant MBS system performance gain compared to those baseline systems.