Two-Stage Cooperative Multicast Transmission with Optimized Power Consumption and Guaranteed Coverage

Wireless multicast is a spectrum efficient method for group-data transmission. This paper focuses on energy efficient two-stage cooperative multicast transmissions, aiming to minimize the total transmission power while ensuring a practical coverage ratio. To focus on the relationship between the base station (BS) power at the first stage (PBS,C) and the total power consumption, a selective combining based on average received signal strength (SCA) is assumed at the receiver and the user density is supposed to be sufficiently high. Then a mobile relay (MR) arrangement based on sector ring structures is proposed for the second stage transmission, followed by an analytical derivation of the optimal PBS,C conditioned on a desired coverage ratio. In addition, further approximations are exploited to provide a simple theoretical estimation for the optimal PBS,C, whose effectiveness is verified by numerical results. It is shown that compared to the conventional one-stage multicast transmission, the proposed two-stage cooperative scheme can reduce the total power consumption and the BS power consumption by more than 40% and 80%, respectively. Although the proposed scheme is obtained based on SCA, when the user density is higher than 2 × 10^-4, a coverage ratio of 95% can be guaranteed by using a practical CP combining with the proposed scheme. Moreover, the effectiveness of the proposed MR arrangement is verified by simulations where it outperforms other three arrangements. It is also shown that targeting at minimizing the total transmission power with guaranteed coverage, the proposed scheme significantly outperforms the existing two-stage scheme in terms of energy consumption and efficiency.