Future TV Content Delivery Over Cellular Networks From Urban to Rural Environments

With the increasing number of TV channels and the growing need for on-demand services, the traditional digital terrestrial television is becoming a less attractive way of distributing TV content. As an alternative, we discuss a converged platform in the UHF band for TV and mobile broadband provisioning based on LTE cellular technology and infrastructure, which is here referred to as CellTV. The requirement for CellTV is to provide seamless TV coverage from urban to rural environments and to minimize the spectrum requirement so that the leftover can be used for mobile services. We formulate an optimal spectrum allocation problem for CellTV to distribute different TV channels with different transmission modes. Each TV channel is delivered via either unicast links or the broadcast over single-frequency networks of different modulation orders according to the location-dependent viewing demand and the cellular infrastructure availability. Based on a case study of the Greater Stockholm region, we identify that CellTV only requires a small portion of the UHF band to deliver the TV content in urban areas, thus releasing a significant amount of spectra for mobile broadband services. Meanwhile, the spectrum requirement for CellTV is considerably higher in suburban and rural areas due to the transitions of transmission modes. We further generalize these findings to provide a guiding principle for CellTV deployment in mixed environments and to demonstrate the flexibility advantage of CellTV in adapting to the growing diversity of TV content.