A Collaborative Wireless Access to On-Demand Services

A collaborative access scheme that exploits the broadcast nature of the wireless communication in order to achieve multicast content delivery is presented in this paper. The key idea is that individual clients requesting for the same content can collaborate and share the same data channel. As opposed to broadcasting, this method enables the clients to determine online the delivered content, and thus supports on-demand services. On the other hand, a multicast content delivery is much more efficient than a unicast content distribution, which must use a dedicated data channel per each and every client.