SC-PTM or MBSFN for Mission Critical Communications?

Long Term Evolution (LTE), designed by 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) to increase the capacity of radio mobile communications, has been endorsed by multiple public protection and disaster relief organizations as a next generation technology for Professional Mobile Radio (PMR) networks, which convey business and mission critical communications. One of the main services of PMR is the group communication that can be seen as a Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Service (MBMS). LTE offers functionality to transmit this type of flows either by MBMS over Single Frequency Network (MBSFN), or Single-Cell Point-To- Multipoint (SC-PTM). In this paper, we compare MBSFN, SC-PTM and unicast transmissions in terms of radio quality, system spectral efficiency and cell coverage. Our main conclusion is that SC-PTM together with Transmission Time Interval (TTI) bundling transmissions offers a flexible solution to trade coverage off for capacity.