Multilevel Coupling Modulation for Multi-Resolution Multimedia Broadcast/Multicast Service in OFDM Systems

To meet the growing demand for multimedia services, Multimedia Broadcast/Multicast Service (MBMS) was proposed to enhance bandwidth efficiency in wireless communication systems. Although MBMS supports multimedia streams with several resolutions, streams with different resolutions are treated as separate services and transmitted upon independent radio resources, resulting in inefficient resource utilization. At the receiver, some valuable information embedded in the higher-resolution channels is not utilized to enhance the reception of the data stream in a lower resolution channel. In this work, we propose a multilevel coupling modulation (MCM) scheme aimed to improve the overall system throughput and to extend the service coverage of the multi-resolution MBMS in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems. The proposed MCM scheme can fully utilize all the usable information conveyed in different channels, thereby improving the receiving performance. In addition, we derive the symbol error rates of the proposed MCM scheme, in the AWGN and frequency-selective fading channels, for performance evaluation. The analytical and simulation results demonstrate that the proposed MCM scheme can substantially enhance the receiving performance, service accessibility and overall system throughput of multi-resolution MBMS in OFDM systems.