Trends and Challenges in Broadcast and Broadband Convergence

The convergence between broadcast and broadband networks has drawn significant attention since the very beginning of their coexistence. Nonetheless, a real cooperation framework has not been successfully implemented yet due to the limits of the contemporary technologies. However, the newly proposed architectures for both broadband and broadcast allow the development of new solutions for multimedia and entertainment content delivery in multi-tier radio access networks. In fact, the convergence of broadcast and broadband technologies is one of the solutions that has been already proposed. Convergence would offer a better spectrum efficiency, improving the quality of service of the broadcasted services to mobile receivers. The main contribution of this paper is a comprehensive state of the arte of the past efforts and on top of that, the definition of the most relevant use cases for several future scenarios.