Title: Multicast repair for broadcast flows to the handheld receivers
Abstract: Mobile TV receivers operate with a weaker link budget in the Digital Video Broadcast (DVB) network compared to the fixed rooftop mounted antenna receivers. Nevertheless, the cellular radio interface is an attractive alternative for broadcast services given its reliability. In this work, we use Long Term Evolution (LTE)'s evolved Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Service (eMBMS) to multicast overhead parity packets among the multicast groups of mobile TV receivers (e.g. smartphones suffering from DVB packet erasures). The proposed multicast scheme recovers erased packets at each smartphone by Systematic RaptorQ Code (SRQC) decoding the directly received DVB transmission along with the overhead packets transmitted via eMBMS multicast. We analyze the load generated in the Cellular Radio Access Network due to this erasure-recovery multicast scheme and compare the gains of such a service over the LTE unicast retransmissions of the missing DVB packets.