TV Broadcast Efficiency in 5G Networks from Subscriber Prospective

The flexibility of radio access network facilitated by 5G networks opens the gateway of deploying dynamic strategies for broadcasting TV channels in an efficient way. Currently, spectrum efficiency and bandwidth efficiency are the two common metrics measuring the efficiency of a system. These metrics assess the net bitrate for a unit of spectrum bandwidth. However, there is a lack of measurement, quantifying the effectiveness of a broadcasting strategy from the user perspective. In this paper, we introduce a novel measurement approach, called broadcast efficiency which considers the mobile user as a main reference. Broadcast efficiency is calculated as the number of served audiences per unit of radio resource. From numerical analysis, we show that broadcasting unpopular TV channels dramatically decreases the broadcast efficiency. This finding is evaluated by employing multiple distributions on the size of audience among TV channels. Furthermore, by conducting a real-life simulation, we discover that a high broadcast efficiency may result in a low percentage of served audiences if the audiences of TV channels are quite evenly distributed.