Cooperative Multicast with Low-Cost Radios

A simple cooperative diversity technique is applied to point-to-multipoint communication in wireless medium suffering from Rayleigh block fading. Such a concept is especially interesting if low-cost radios, which have no advanced capabilities for fading mitigation, are used. This paper analyzes the communication reliability in terms of outage and delivery ratio, and compares cooperative and non-cooperative schemes. Results from a simple setup show that already few preselected relays can lead to performance gains. A potential application field is link-layer broadcast in a network of energy-constrained embedded devices.