Cost Analysis of the MBMS Multicast Mode of UMTS

Along with the widespread deployment of the third generation cellular networks, the fast-improving capabilities of the mobile devices, content and service providers are increasingly interested in supporting multicast communications over wireless networks and in particular over universal mobile telecommunications system (UMTS). To this direction, the third generation partnership project (3 GPP) is currently standardizing the multimedia broadcast/multicast service (MBMS) framework of UMTS. In this paper, we present an overview of the MBMS multicast mode of UMTS. We analytically present the multicast mode of the MBMS and analyze its performance in terms of packet delivery cost under various network topologies, cell types and multicast users´ distributions. Furthermore, for the evaluation of the scheme, we consider different transport channels for the transmission of the data over the UTRAN interfaces.