Multicast Feedback Mirroring to Reduce Signaling Overhead
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Solution Overview
Problem
Multicast data transmission in point-to-multipoint systems faces inefficiencies due to excessive feedback signaling, particularly when retransmissions are needed, as each recipient must send separate feedback messages, leading to significant channel capacity usage and interference, especially in large recipient groups.
Innovation Solution
A method where a transmitting station receives confirmation messages from one receiving station and mirrors them to others, allowing informed decision-making without individual feedback from all stations, and initiates retransmissions upon receiving a negative acknowledgement, reducing unnecessary signaling and channel usage.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If each recipient sends separate feedback messages to the transmitting station, then the transmitting station can determine which recipients need retransmissions, but the feedback signaling amount increases significantly and occupies channel capacity
Solution Approach 1:
The patent combines multiple individual feedback messages from recipients into a single collective feedback message. Instead of each recipient sending separate acknowledgments, the system merges these feedback signals to indicate whether any recipient needs retransmission, thereby reducing the overall feedback signaling amount while maintaining retransmission reliability.
Solution Approach 2:
The transmitting station sends a copy of the collective feedback message to all recipients. This allows each recipient to learn whether retransmission is needed without each recipient individually signaling the transmitting station, thus reducing feedback overhead while ensuring all recipients have the necessary information.
2Reliability
If retransmission is performed when at least one recipient requests it, then all recipients can receive the retransmitted data, but another point-to-multipoint transmission is required occupying channel capacity
Solution Approach 1:
The patent merges the retransmission operation into a single point-to-multipoint transmission event. When any recipient needs retransmission, the system performs one collective retransmission to all recipients simultaneously, rather than individual point-to-point retransmissions, thereby improving channel capacity efficiency while maintaining data delivery reliability.
3Reliability
If confirmation messages from multiple recipients are collected and processed, then the transmitting station can make informed retransmission decisions, but the processing time and complexity increase
Solution Approach 1:
The patent extracts only the essential information from recipient feedback - specifically, whether any recipient needs retransmission - without processing detailed individual feedback from each recipient. This extraction approach maintains retransmission decision accuracy while significantly reducing processing time and complexity.
Solution Approach 2:
The system performs partial feedback processing by focusing only on the critical aspect of feedback (whether retransmission is needed) rather than fully processing all individual recipient feedback messages. This partial action approach reduces processing overhead while maintaining sufficient decision accuracy for retransmission operations.
Data Source
AI summary
Data transmission in a multicast fashion in which retransmissions are requested by recipients sending feedback to the one sender. Receiving stations are informed about the feedback of another receiving station. This is done by mirroring the feedback of receiving stations to other receiving stations. Due to this, in case, for example, one of the mirrored feedbacks is a negative acknowledgement message, the other receiving stations are informed that it is no longer necessary to provide their feedback, since a retransmission will be initiated anyway. Advantageously, this may allow reduced interference in the direction of the feedback.