Multipath Cellular Network Architecture for Quality Assured Multimedia Delivery

Assuring quality of service (QoS) is an extreme challenge in cellular multimedia delivery especially in single path transmission. One possible way to improve QoS is to provide multipath transmission. In this paper, we introduce a novel multi-path cellular network architecture through placement of additional base stations (BSs), i.e., antennae in the existing cellular architecture. This architecture provides a mobile unit (MU) with more than one communication links from the BSs placed in different locations. The availability of multiple channels allows the implementation of path diversity transmission protocols and improves error resilience capability for multimedia services. The multiple diversified path links reduces outage probability. We show that our proposed architecture provides better reliability and maintains cell capacity for high bandwidth multimedia services while improving signal to interference ratio compared to the existing cellular network model.