3G wireless multicasting service description discovery and transport

Wireless Multicasting is a technology that enables data and multimedia services to be delivered from a single source to a group of mobile receivers particularly for the actors in the broadcasting and telecommunication world. Although multicasting has been extensively researched in the past, the wired IP Multicast model has not picked up due to various limitations. The new generation wireless counterpart of this technology is receiving tremendous interest from all over the world.In this work, first we have provided a survey of recent technological improvements for wireless multicasting in both cellular and broadcast world. Then, one of the 3G wireless multicasting architecture, 3GPP?s MBMS (Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Services) in UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunication System) networks, is investigated with a focus on reliable download mechanism. We have provided an end to end download prototype for MBMS. Our prototype, called MBMS legacy download, also covers an implementation of a Service Discovery Architecture. As a unique contribution the thesis provides the gain of using progressive download instead of legacy download and proposes ways to increase the gain for streamable multimedia files for MBMS. With progressive download, downloadable media can be streamed earlier after some waiting time, while the downloading still continues in the background. First we provide optimizations of the parameters for an efficient MBMS legacy download. Then based on these optimizations, we provide experimental analyses to show the gain in using progressive download in MBMS. Finally in order to further increase the progressive download performance, we apply our application layer interleaving strategy to our MBMS download systems and give a performance comparison of the legacy, interleaved and progressive download delivery. This work has has been fully funded by TUBITAK and Vidiator Technology US under the project EEEAG 104E163.