Broadcast Network Coverage with Multicell Cooperation

Multicell cooperation has been identified as one of the underlying principles for future wireless communication systems. This paper studies the benefits of multicell cooperation in broadcast TV network from an information theoretical perspective. We define outage capacity as the figure of merit and derive the broadcast coverage area to evaluate such system. Specifically, we calculate the broadcast coverage area with given common information rate and outage probabilities when multiple base stations collaboratively transmit the broadcast signals. For the general MIMO case where receivers have multiple antennas, we provide simulation results to illustrate the expanded coverage area. In all cases, our results show that the coverage of a TV broadcast network can be significantly improved by multicell cooperation.