Efficient area formation for LTE broadcasting

An effective way to provide popular content in LTE networks is through broadcast and multicast services (a.k.a. eMBMS). This requires to aggregate cells into areas where transmissions are synchronized in time so that each area broadcasts the same set of content items, on the same radio resources. We look at an aspect of LTE broadcasting that has been scarcely addressed so far: how to form broadcasting areas and assign content to them so that radio resources are efficiently exploited and user requests satisfied. Due to its high complexity, we solve the problem through an original clustering heuristics, named Single-Content Fusion (SCF), that initially aggregates cells into single-content areas by maximizing cell similarity in content interests. Such areas are then merged into multiple-content areas leveraging similarity in spatial coverage. The validity of our solution is shown by the excellent match with the optimum in a toy scenario and by the remarkable advantages SCF provides in large-scale, real-world scenarios, in comparison to other heuristic approaches.