Comparison of MBSFN, SC-PTM and Unicast for Mission Critical Communication

Abstract

Mission Critical Communication (MCC) Services are currently provided through secure and reliable Professional Mobile Radio (PMR) dedicated networks. These services include voice, data and video delivery. During an emergency, timely access to video streaming can increase situational awareness and enhance life-saving operations. Therefore, to improve the capabilities of PMR networks and benefit from the advantages of mutualization, standard cellular technologies based on 4G and 5G were adopted for MCC. In particular, the evolved Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Service (eMBMS) is suitable for the transmission of group communication services. There are two broadcast transmission modes proposed in eMBMS: Multicast Broadcast Single Frequency Network (MBSFN) and Single-Cell Point-to-Multipoint (SC-PTM). In this paper, we compare MBSFN, SC-PTM and Unicast (UC) in Mission Critical (MC) scenarios from a resource use perspective. More precisely, we calculate the system spectral efficiency in each mode and estimate the number of users per square kilometer demanding the same MC service from which MBSFN and SC-PTM become more efficient than UC. Results show that SC-PTM is the best solution for locally restricted and small-scale emergencies while MBSFN is more suitable for emergencies during massive events or wide-area scenarios.

An Adaptive MBSFN Resource Allocation Algorithm for Multicast and Unicast Traffic

“…However, this work does not consider the joint optimization of MBSFN Alloc and MBSFN Period, and also lacks real-time testbed experimentation and analysis. With an end goal of achieving resource allocation efficiency for mission critical communications, MBSFN, SC-PTM and unicast transmissions have been compared in detail in [16]. For emergencies concerning big events and wide-area layouts, MBSFN is better in terms of performance, whereas, SC-PTM is more suitable for emergencies spanning over a smaller scale.…”

Spectral Efficiency Optimization in Mass Transmission for Civil and Military Security

“…This is especially true when it comes to finding the optimal number of antennas in SC-PTM mode with beamforming and the optimal size of the MB-SFN area. Nevertheless, few works compare MB-SFN mode and SC-PTM mode without beamforming for public safety and critical applications [9,[12][13][14]. In contrast to these works, in our study, we consider that the BS are trisector (each with a 1208 aperture) with antennas capable of using beamforming technology in SC-PTM mode and that the BS are distributed according to a Poisson Point Process (PPP) law instead of the regular hexagonal model.…”