A Capacity Theorem for Cooperative Multicasting in Large Wireless Networks

We consider a scenario in which a sender wishes to broadcast a common message to a large number of receivers in a slowly fading wireless environment. We exploit cooperation between the receivers but impose an average sum power constraint across the network. As the number of receivers K → ∞, there is a critical rate C for the common message such that the outage probability of every receiver approaches zero for all rates below C and is bounded away from zero above this rate. We compare our work with previous work on cooperative diversity that focuses on the diversity-multiplexing tradeoff.