An Early Technical Evaluation of Convergence between Cellular and Broadcast Media

Convergence between telecommunications and the broadcast worlds is one of the trends of current network evolution. The UMTS specifications are being enhanced to support broadcast and multicast down to the end-user terminal. The multimedia broadcast /multicast service (MBMS) bearer services define a point-to-multipoint capability on the UMTS radio interface. The Institut Eurecom has developed, in the context of several research projects, an experimental software radio platform based on UMTS-TDD that provides direct interconnection with an IPv6 core network. Its contribution to the European research project Daidalos consists in integrating the MBMS point-to-multipoint bearer service in the radio platform and in the Daidalos architecture. This integration requires the identification and resolution of several specific topics such as the sharing of radio channels with the unicast traffic. Also, the sequence model for the service activation and deactivation must be revised to ensure on-request radio resource allocation. Finally, as part of the IP mobility architecture, the project envisions a seamless handover between a DVB-T cell and an MBMS cell. This paper addresses all these issues and presents some results of the implementation of this service on a software radio experimental platform