Future Hybrid Cellular-Broadcasting Systems for Multimedia Multicasting

This paper discusses hybrid cellular-broadcasting systems as an alternative for future delivery of wireless multimedia multicast services. A resource management framework is proposed, with the objective of minimizing the cost of multicasting transmissions. A comparison with traditional cellular and broadcasting systems is performed, showing the advantages of the hybrid solution under specific settings. Several implementation issues are investigated, as the number of broadcasting modulation and coding rates (MCR) and the importance of radio link monitoring. Dynamic control of the coverage of the broadcasting system by choosing from a pre-defined set of MCRs is shown to be the most important requirement for minimizing transmission cost. As the existing digital broadcasting technologies do not offer the possibility to dynamically change the MCR, several possibilities to overcome this are identified.