Thresholds of outperformance among Broadcast/Multicast access techniques in 5G networks

Broadcast/multicast technologies are a key enabler for multiple applications and services in the future 5G New Radio (NR). The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) works for the new phases of the 5G standard in a novel multimedia broadcast multicast service (5G-MBMS). It will take advantage of the previous multicast approaches and emerging techniques like non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA), helping to reach the goals of 5G cellular systems and beyond. This paper aims to define outperformance thresholds among broadcast/multicast access techniques for multimedia services in 5G networks. We define such thresholds among three multicast techniques: conventional multicast scheme (CMS), subgrouping based on orthogonal multiple access (OMA), and subgrouping based on power domain non-orthogonal multiple access (P-NOMA). We compare the multicast techniques' performance under a wide range of users' distributions, reception conditions, and specific throughput requirements of the broadcast/multicast multimedia service. We take advantage of the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm to identify the multicast techniques' outperformance thresholds. The proposal and the complete analysis are based on evaluating the aggregated data rate (ADR) and a proposed group-oriented metric. The validation and results analysis shows the boundary conditions of performance among the considered multicast techniques and possible use cases.