Study of Multicast Broadcast Single Frequency Network Area in Multicast Communications

Abstract

Multicast was introduced in Long-Term Evolution (LTE) in release 8 as the technology for the Evolved Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Services (eMBMS) and has been steadily updated in the later releases. Unlike unicast where available resources are split amongst each User Equipment (UE), in Multicast Broadcast Single Frequency Network (MBSFN), all the resources can be allocated to reach all UEs. This prominent advantage together with the prevalent signal improvement make MBSFN a popular LTE and 5G evolution technique. In this paper, we focus on the LTE Multicast Broadcast Single Frequency Network (MB-SFN) technology from the perspective of the MBSFN area and its application in public safety networks (PSNs). Since the MBSFN area plays a pivotal role in performance improvement and public safety incidents differ in their scales, using our state-of-the-art system-level simulations, we explore performance distributions within MBSFN areas of different shapes and sizes, as well as the impacts of MBSFN area locations relative to the network. We show that the results can give an informative insight into the MBSFN area for in-coverage performance prediction/evaluation or out-of-coverage mobile base station deployments.