Towards a Unified 5G Broadcast‐Broadband Architecture

TV broadcasting and mobile broadband are undoubtedly essential parts of today's society. Both of them are now facing tremendous challenges to cope with the future demands. In the United Kingdom, Germany, Ireland and Poland the digital satellite platform is the largest TV platform. However, regardless of whether consumers are using digital satellite or DTT to receive their TV content, neither of these platforms currently meets the needs of a growing non‐linear, truly on‐demand consumption paradigm. Both satellite and High‐Power High‐Tower Digital TV (DTV) infrastructure have been designed for a one‐to‐many architecture with limited scope for feedback channels and user‐controlled scheduling, especially in mobile and portable situations. Hybrid approaches including mobile broadband are, however, developing progressively in a large number of countries. TV and mobile broadband have strong similarities in their challenges. Moreover, the recent trend in TV consumption patterns suggests that the TV of the future will be quite similar to the mobile broadband of the coming years in many aspects. Both services have to provide the customer with (ultra‐)high quality video in a dynamic and interactive manner. This necessitates an efficient solution for converged broadcast and mobile broadband services. In order to address these challenges, some candidate network architectures for future terrestrial TV distribution have been proposed, including a clean‐slate approach (all broadband), hybrid and common converged system. However, it is suggested that substantial further study is required to evaluate the benefit of these architectures and to develop a better solution out of the existing ones. In this chapter, we emphasise the current challenges facing the broadcasting and mobile industries to deliver next generation TV services, and provide an overview of these architectures that could potentially be adopted to provide a ‘win‐win’ Broadcast‐Broadband (BC‐BB) convergence solution for 5G networks.