Dynamic MBSFN Beam Area Formation in 6G Multibeam Non-Terrestrial Networks

Abstract

Providing innovative services and ensuring ubiquitous, ultrahigh-density, extreme-data-rate, and very low latency communications are essential for future sixth-generation systems, where the importance of non-terrestrial networks (NTNs) will incredibly rise. However, the management of both the capacity and the radio spectrum remains one of the main challenges, when a huge number of devices require access to dissimilar broadcast services at the same time. To cope with these issues, traditional single-beam satellite systems can be replaced with very high throughput satellite, where multibeam transmissions increase the capacity and improve the spectrum utilization while limiting interbeam interference. In this article, we propose a dynamic multicast/broadcast single-frequency network (MBSFN) beam area formation (D-MBAF) algorithm that dynamically groups beams into dedicated MBSFN beam areas (MBAs) to increase the aggregate data rate (ADR) of the multibeam NTN system and deliver a given video content to all the interested NTN terminals. D-MBAF leverages multicast subgrouping by clustering the NTN terminals into different MBAs that are simultaneously served with different data rates. Furthermore, the D-MBAF algorithm delivers the video content in different flows: the base layer with lower resolution and a set of enhancement layers with higher resolutions. Radio resources are efficiently allocated to avoid interference among the beams belonging to different MBAs. A simulation campaign is carried out under different scenarios to assess the effectiveness of the proposed D-MBAF algorithm in terms of mean throughput, ADR, resource block utilization, and number of sent layers. Obtained results confirm that the D-MBAF algorithm outperforms the single-frequency multibeam transmission and the multilayer video delivery schemes used as benchmarks.