Roads to Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Services in 5G New Radio

Broadcast and multicast represent a key opportunity in 5G for the massive consumption of multimedia services in the near future. These technologies permit to offload an important portion of this traffic in peak demand scenarios where users are consuming parallel content. An initial specification of 5G New Radio (NR) Rel'15 was delivered in December 2017 and the final version will be published in June this year. However, 3GPP has not yet defined any broadcast/multicast solution for Rel'15 NR, although some proposals will be revisited as soon as time units in Rel'16 become available. In this work, we analyze the use of a mixed mode that shares multicast, broadcast and unicast resources via the same physical channel. This technology, as well as its LTE counterpart, is evaluated through link level air interface and subsequently system level simulations, providing an objective insight roads to MBMS provision in 5G NR.