Enhancement of MBMS through Macro Diversity Schemes in a Microcell Environment

The third generation partnership project has defined for its 6th release of the universal mobile telecommunications system a new service known as multimedia broadcast multicast service. It satisfies the bandwidth and quality of service requirements of real-time streaming services, by taking advantage on the radio and network interface of the proprieties of a broadcast/multicast system. In this paper we present an analysis on several macro diversity combining schemes, such as selective, maximum ratio, and switched combining in a microcell environment. These schemes take advantage of point to multipoint transmission across the network to reduce the required power, allowing for more bandwidth to be available in the cell/band.