Area formation and content assignment for LTE broadcasting

Abstract

Broadcasting and multicasting services in LTE networks are shaping up to be an effective way to provide popular content. A key requirement is that cells are aggregated into areas where a tight time synchronization among transmissions is enforced, so as to broadcast the same radio resources. Our paper addresses a facet of LTE broadcasting that has so far received little attention: the creation of broadcasting areas and the assignment of content to them in order to efficiently exploit radio resources and satisfy user requests. Our original clustering approach, named Single-Content Fusion, achieves these goals by initially aggregating cells into single-content areas and maximizing cell similarity in content interests. Aggregated areas are then merged into multiple-content areas by virtue of similar spatial coverage. We show the validity of our solution pointing out the advantages it provides in comparison to other approaches. We also discuss the impact of various system factors (e.g., number of served users, broadcast data rate, area size) and the scalability of our proposal in large, realistic scenarios with both static and time-varying user interest.

Nonorthogonal Multiple Access and Subgrouping for Improved Resource Allocation in Multicast 5G NR

“…1) OMA techniques One of the most relevant OMA-based subgrouping works is presented in [13]. Casetti et al presented a two-step procedure that merges significantly overlapped areas in space considering similar users' contents.…”

A Novel Approach for MBSFN Area Formation Aided by D2D Communications for eMBB Service Delivery in 5G NR Systems

“…The Single Content Fusion (SCF) scheme [10] [11] is the first work providing a dynamic method for MBSFN Areas formation and content items selection, based on interest similarity. SCF first creates single-content MBSFN areas, including cells with similar content interests, and then it merges the created MBSFN Areas that could overlap.…”

“…The main simulation settings are reported in Table III. The performance of the D2D-MAF algorithm is compared to that of the SCF algorithm [10] [11]. For a fair comparison between D2D-MAF and SCF, we make the following two assumptions.…”

“…Hence, in the same cell the MBMS service can be delivered through either MBSFN, D2D, or unicast transmission. To assess the effectiveness of the proposed D2D-MAF, simulation campaigns have been carried out and results compared with those obtained by the Single Content Fusion (SCF) scheme [10] [11], which we consider as a benchmark. The system performance analysis has been carried out under different TDD frame configurations for both D2D-MAF and SCF.…”