Reducing the Transmission Power Requirements of the Multimedia Broadcast/Multicast Service

The multimedia broadcast/multicast service (MBMS) was designed to support the economical distribution of multimedia content to large numbers of receivers in 3rd generation cellular networks. In this paper we present and evaluate an MBMS extension that reduces the transmission power requirements while increasing the number of potential users of such services, by supporting the distribution of multiple variants of the same content to heterogeneous receivers. We first describe the standard MBMS model, along with its state management and signaling procedures, as well as our extended MBMS model, in terms of the modifications that it imposes on the standard. We then present an analytical and simulation evaluation of the transmission power requirements of our approach against alternatives based on standard MBMS, showing that our approach maximizes the number of potential users, without excessive transmission power requirements.