Comparison of MBSFN, SC-PTM and Unicast for Mission Critical Communication

Mission Critical Communication (MCC) Services are currently provided through secure and reliable Professional Mobile Radio (PMR) dedicated networks. These services include voice, data and video delivery. During an emergency, timely access to video streaming can increase situational awareness and enhance life-saving operations. Therefore, to improve the capabilities of PMR networks and benefit from the advantages of mutualization, standard cellular technologies based on 4G and 5G were adopted for MCC. In particular, the evolved Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Service (eMBMS) is suitable for the transmission of group communication services. There are two broadcast transmission modes proposed in eMBMS: Multicast Broadcast Single Frequency Network (MBSFN) and Single-Cell Point-to-Multipoint (SC-PTM). In this paper, we compare MBSFN, SC-PTM and Unicast (UC) in Mission Critical (MC) scenarios from a resource use perspective. More precisely, we calculate the system spectral efficiency in each mode and estimate the number of users per square kilometer demanding the same MC service from which MBSFN and SC-PTM become more efficient than UC. Results show that SC-PTM is the best solution for locally restricted and small-scale emergencies while MBSFN is more suitable for emergencies during massive events or wide-area scenarios.