Single Frequency-Based Device-to-Device-Enhanced Video Delivery for Evolved Multimedia Broadcast and Multicast Services

Abstract

Despite of the undisputed benefits of the long term evolution-advanced (LTE-A) networks, offering support for group-oriented services challenges the evolved multimedia broadcast multicast services (eMBMS) design in LTE-A. This is especially important when delivering video content with high bitrate requirements. The conventional multicast scheme (CMS) is proposed as a radio resource allocation solution for eMBMS to serve all multicast group members with the data rate supported by the receiver with the worst channel conditions. In this paper, we propose a novel radio resource management approach, the device-to-device (D2D)-enhanced CMS with single frequency (D2D-SF). This proposal extends the CMS with additional D2D communications in order to increase the aggregate data rate of the cell, while also maintaining the typical CMS short-term fairness. D2D-SF makes use of one or more mobile subscriber devices as forwarding devices (FD) to retransmit the data received from the base station (BS) over direct local links to other members of the multicast group. The proposed solution supports both high-rate modulation and coding schemes on the downlink from BS to FDs, and reaches cell-edge devices (hence, experiencing worse channel conditions) through high-performing D2D links (improving this experience). Testing shows how the single frequency-based D2D CMS paradigm proposed, complemented by two novel strategies for selecting FDs, achieves significant enhancements of the overall performance when delivering video content compared to both the state-of-the-art multicast solutions and novel solutions that do not employ a single-frequency paradigm.Index Terms-long term evolution-advanced (LTE-A), multicasting, device-to-device (D2D) communications, radio resource management (RRM), video delivery.

Multicasting over Emerging 5G Networks: Challenges and Perspectives

“…Researches in [4][5][6][7][8][9], for instance, proposed to serve only the portion of users with good channel conditions directly from the eNodeB, and use them as relay-entities to forward data toward the remaining receivers over shortrange D2D links. The main issue in this scenario is cluster formation, i.e., the selection of the right amount of relaying devices to serve via the base station.…”

“…Obtained results demonstrate that in a macro-cell about 80 percent of power consumption can be saved thanks to the wise use of D2D communications. Recently, the authors of [9] proposed a novel approach for D2D cluster formation, which encompasses the previous techniques. By assuming macrocell-driven synchronization of the transmitting relay nodes and the interest of all receiving devices in the same multicast content, they propose to allocate resources on the same frequency to all relay nodes for multicast data forwarding over D2D links.…”

A Fast and Reliable Broadcast Service for LTE-Advanced Exploiting Multihop Device-to-Device Transmissions

“…Multihop D2D communications in LTE-A networks have been studied in several works, e.g., [12][13][14][15][16][17]. In [12], authors consider multihop D2D communications in order to extend the network coverage and propose a resource allocation strategy to optimize the throughput along the multihop paths.…”

“…Moreover, P2MP communications are not considered. In [16], P2P D2D communications are considered in order to enhance the evolved Multimedia Broadcast and Multicast Services (eMBMS) provided by LTE-A networks. In this case, the eNB transmits its multimedia content to a subset of UEs and the latter exploit D2D links to forward the data to UEs with poor channel conditions in the downlink, i.e., cell-edge UEs.…”

A centralised Wi-Fi management framework for D2D communications in dense Wi-Fi networks

“…The issues of Radio Resource Management (RRM) and interference for D2D communications in cellular networks have been the focus of current work in the literature [9][10][11], while little attention has been paid for those in Wi-Fi networks. Moreover, all related works assume that D2D connections are established following the self-organising approach.…”