An Adaptive MIMO Scheme for E-MBMS in Point-to-Multipoint Transmission Mode

Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Service (MBMS), also called enhanced MBMS (e-MBMS) in LTE terminology, was introduced in the release 6 of the 3GPP standard to deliver multimedia content to a large group of users. The main requirement during the provision of MBMS services is to make an efficient overall usage of radio and network resources. There are two wireless transmission modes defined in LTE, i.e. Point-to-Point (P-t-P) and Point-to-Multipoint (P-t-M) transmission modes. MIMO systems promise high performance gains over conventional single antenna systems. It is expected to be an important component of the LTE particularly for the MBMS. In this paper, an adaptive MIMO scheme for E-MBMS in P-t-M transmission mode is presented and analyzed. Both spatial multiplexing and diversity techniques are focused on. Different spatial techniques are adaptively used depending on the different users´ distributions in one MBMS section. Spatial diversity technique is used to enhance signal strength of the cell edge users; and spatial multiplexing technique is used to increase the data rate of the users with good signal strength. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can improve the BER performance of the cell edge users, and increase the transmit data rate and data throughput.