Single Frequency-Based Device-to-Device-Enhanced Video Delivery for Evolved Multimedia Broadcast and Multicast Services

Despite of the undisputed benefits of the long term evolution-advanced (LTE-A) networks, offering support for group-oriented services challenges the evolved multimedia broadcast multicast services (eMBMS) design in LTE-A. This is especially important when delivering video content with high bitrate requirements. The conventional multicast scheme (CMS) is proposed as a radio resource allocation solution for eMBMS to serve all multicast group members with the data rate supported by the receiver with the worst channel conditions. In this paper, we propose a novel radio resource management approach, the device-to-device (D2D)-enhanced CMS with single frequency (D2D-SF). This proposal extends the CMS with additional D2D communications in order to increase the aggregate data rate of the cell, while also maintaining the typical CMS short-term fairness. D2D-SF makes use of one or more mobile subscriber devices as forwarding devices (FD) to retransmit the data received from the base station (BS) over direct local links to other members of the multicast group. The proposed solution supports both high-rate modulation and coding schemes on the downlink from BS to FDs, and reaches cell-edge devices (hence, experiencing worse channel conditions) through high-performing D2D links (improving this experience). Testing shows how the single frequency-based D2D CMS paradigm proposed, complemented by two novel strategies for selecting FDs, achieves significant enhancements of the overall performance when delivering video content compared to both the state-of-the-art multicast solutions and novel solutions that do not employ a single-frequency paradigm.