Converged Distribution of 5G Media: Opportunities of Overlaid Broadcast and Emerging Applications Over Dual Connectivity

Abstract

This paper encompasses various topics for 5G-involved broadcasting under the common context converged distribution of 5G media. Particularly, two primary subtopics are addressed: An overlaid coexistence of 5G terrestrial broadcast and Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) 3.0; and dual connectivity applications built on top of the convergence between digital broadcasting and 5G unicasting. In the first part, a viable, time-sharing co-transmission system is introduced to overlay 5G Broadcast and ATSC 3.0 frames in the same radio spectrum. The system is carefully designed to comply with current 5G and ATSC 3.0 standards, so that it does not require modifications in either ATSC 3.0 or 5G specifications. To help the future planning in a technical aspect, the reliability performance is in-depth compared between 5G Broadcast and ATSC 3.0 frames, and the motivation of tower overlaying is discussed as well. Subsequently in the <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$2^{\mathrm{ nd}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> part, the convergence is in parallel explored with respect to the dual connectivity. To settle a broad-ranged consensus for future convergence, various possible use cases are proposed in an application aspect. Technical, conceptual proposals and implementations are presented, specifically related to edge caching; 8K streaming (with a working prototype); large-scale software updating; data security; and location tracking. We hereby point out how dual connectivity can contribute to realistic scenarios. In turn, the scope of convergence use cases is desirably expanded, so that would encourage the initiatives bridging 5G and broadcasting into practice.