Evaluating Unicast and MBSFN in Public Safety Networks

Public safety incidents typically involve a significant amount of group traffic and have a stringent requirement of connection reliability. Hence multicast could potentially improve network and user performance significantly, which triggered our study on Long-Term Evolution (LTE) Multicast Broadcast Single Frequency Network (MBSFN). In this paper, we first derive a realistic MBSFN Signal-to-Interference-plus-Noise Ratio (SINR) analytical model, with multiple antennas, multipath channel, and equalizer considered. Then through comprehensive system level simulations, we compare MBSFN and unicast in terms of resource efficiency v.s. throughput, as well as outage probability. We also study the impacts of MBSFN size and quantify the MBSFN SINR improvement due to diversity combining and interference reduction, respectively.