Enhancing Reliable Mobile Multicasting with

A crucial point on the successful deployment of multicast services is the enhanced reliability by means of ad- vanced error control schemes. To this direction Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) has standardized exclusively for Multimedia Broadcast/Multicast Services (MBMS) the use of a Forward Error Correction (FEC) mechanism on the application layer based on Raptor codes. Since the standardized systematic, fountain Raptor code is now considered obsolete, the emergence of a new variant of Raptor codes, named RaptorQ, provides enhanced capabilities for mobile multicast services. In this paper, we provide a performance comparison of the standardized Raptor Application Layer FEC (AL-FEC) scheme with the very promising RaptorQ FEC code. We examine the enhancements that RaptorQ introduces on the AL-FEC protection robustness, providing a thorough performance analysis in comparison with the current Raptor FEC scheme. Furthermore, in order to verify the improved performance of RaptorQ, we provide several simulation results utilizing the ns-3 environment, considering the application of both the examined AL-FEC schemes over multicast services for next generation mobile networks.