Flooding Data in a Cell: Is Cellular Multicast Better than Device-to-Device Communications?

Filippo Rebecchi (1) , Marcelo Dias de Amorim (2, 1) , Vania Conan (3)

1 NPA - Networks and Performance Analysis
2 LINCS - Laboratory of Information, Network and Communication Sciences
3 Thales Communications [Colombes]

A natural method to disseminate popular data on cellular networks is to use multicast. Despite having clear advantages over unicast, multicast does not offer any kind of reliability and could result costly in terms of cellular resources in the case at least one of the destinations is at the edge of the cell (i.e., with poor radio conditions). In this paper, we show that, when content dissemination tolerates some delay, providing device-to-device communications over an orthogonal channel increases the efficiency of multicast, concurring also to offload part of the traffic from the infrastructure. Our evaluation simulates an LTE macro-cell with mobile receivers and reveals that the joint utilization of device-to-device communications and multicasting brings significant resource savings while increasing the cellular throughput.

Mots clés: hybrid networks; delay-tolerant networks; mobile data offloading; Cellular multicast

Domaines: Réseaux et télécommunications [cs.NI]

Filippo Rebecchi, Marcelo Dias de Amorim, Vania Conan. Flooding Data in a Cell: Is Cellular Multicast Better than Device-to-Device Communications?. Ninth ACM MobiCom Workshop on Challenged Networks (CHANTS '14), Sep 2014, Maui, HI, United States. pp.19-24, ⟨10.1145/2645672.2645678⟩. ⟨hal-01026075⟩