Small area broadcast in LTE

Broadcast is an efficient way of delivering same content to a group of UEs. Two kinds of MBMS bearers were defined for broadcast over LTE: MBSFN for large area broadcast, SC-PTM for single cell broadcast. However, neither bearer is efficient in small area broadcast. This paper proposes two new MBMS bearer types SA-PTM and CoMP-PTM for efficient small area broadcast. SA-PTM enables synchronized SC-PTM broadcast leveraging the MBSFN gain, for the case where the number of receiving UEs is large. CoMP-PTM extends unicast CoMP to broadcast, for the case where the number of receiving UEs is small. Simulation shows new bearer types have much better performance than SC-PTM and MBSFN in small area broadcast. In addition, this paper proposes a novel physical layer counting mechanism for efficient optimal MBMS bearer type selecting.