Bandwidth and energy efficiency of video broadcasting services over LTE/LTE-A

Mobile video services are becoming a dominant traffic category in emerging fourth generation (4G) cellular networks such as the 3GPP Long-Term Evolution (LTE) and LTE-Advanced (LTE-A). In particular, mobile video broadcasting services such as 3GPP evolved Multimedia Multicast/Broadcast Service (eMBMS) will require considerable resources for highquality video service delivery with high coverage probability. Faced with the challenge of bandwidth and energy efficient eMBMS provisioning over LTE/LTE-A, in this paper, we develop simple analytical tools for evaluation of average service data rates, bandwidth and energy-consumption requirements in different eMBMS LTE/LTE-A service configurations. Moreover, we introduce and evaluate novel bandwidth and energy performance measures defined per unit of service with the goal of comparing the service delivery efficiency of different LTE/LTE-A configurations. The results in the paper focus on eMBMS provisioning over two macro-cellular LTE/LTE-A configurations in 3GPP: i) a single frequency network eMBMS, and ii) a single-cell eMBMS.