3GPP Enhancements for Television Services: LTE‐Based 5G Terrestrial Broadcast

Abstract

The provision of terrestrial broadcast services using 3GPP technologies was enabled for the first time in LTE Advanced Pro Release (Rel‐) 14, in which the evolved Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Service (eMBMS) technology was enhanced to fulfill a wide set of requirements input by the broadcast industry. During the Enhancements for Television (EnTV) work item in Rel‐14, several modifications were realized affecting system architecture, core, and radio access, which include, an interface to grant control to broadcasters to establish audiovisual services, an application programming interface for developers to simplify access to eMBMS procedures, or a transparent delivery mode with native content formats, among others. At the radio layer, dedicated carriers with 100% broadcast content allocation, and also new OFDM numerologies to support larger intersite distances in Single Frequency Networks (SFNs), were enabled. The most significant change was the so‐called receive‐only mode which enables devices receiving broadcast content without the need for uplink capabilities, SIM cards, or network subscriptions, i.e. free‐to‐air reception.In Rel‐16, 3GPP carried out a study item to evaluate EnTV Rel‐14 against the terrestrial broadcast requirements for 5G defined in 3GPP TR 38.913. Two requirements were detected as not met: the ability to support SFNs with cell radii of up to 100 km and mobile reception with speeds up to 250 km h−1. A Rel‐16 work item standardized further improvements while taking into account practical considerations such as implementation complexity and performance. The improved system is known as LTE‐based 5G Terrestrial Broadcast, and also with the popular name 5G Broadcast.

A survey on road safety and traffic efficiency vehicular applications based on C-V2X technologies

“…eMBMS (evolved Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Service) provides point-to-multipoint communications through the Uu interface of 3GPP cellular networks [29] [30]. The initial method for resource allocation in eMBMS is called MBSFN (Multicast Broadcast Single Frequency Network), and was designed for video channel broadcasting.…”

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“…Long Term Evolution (LTE)-based 5G Terrestrial Broadcast, commonly referred to as 5G Broadcast [11], was specified to fulfill requirements for TV and radio broadcasting [12].…”

Single Frequency Networks for 5G Broadcast: a Software Defined Radio Experiment

“…The most important features of FeMBMS are the use of a receive-only mode, where there is no need for a SIM card, and hence, allows for an open transmission as used in traditional DTT services; the support of larger Inter-Site Distances (ISD) of up to 60 km, in order to re-use the existing HPHT broadcast infrastructure; and 100% allocation of radio resources to broadcast services with all subframes within a frame dedicated to the Physical Multicast Channel (PMCH). FeMBMS also includes the cell acquisition subframe (CAS) concept, described in [13].…”