Energy efficiency of hybrid unicast-broadcast networks for mobile TV services

The increasing popularity of linear services such as mobile TV, broadcasting live and sports events using mobile and portable devices, has led to a dramatic growth of the mobile data traffic. To deal with this traffic explosion, future networks have to increase the capacity offered to mobile communications, while at the same time trying to reduce their energy consumption. Actually, recent studies have shown that network cooperation is a promising candidate to deal with such issues. Based on these facts, this paper addresses the optimization of the energy efficiency of a hybrid network in which a broadcast and a unicast networks cooperate to deliver linear type of services to mobile and portable devices. Two optimization methods have been proposed to analytically find the optimal broadcast coverage area that maximizes the energy efficiency of the hybrid network. Simulation results show that using such a hybrid approach improves the overall energy efficiency.