Towards an LTE hybrid unicast broadcast content delivery framework

Abstract

The era of ubiquitous access to a rich selection of interactive and high quality multimedia has begun; with it, significant challenges in data demand have been placed on mobile network technologies. Content creators and broadcasters alike have embraced the additional capabilities offered by network delivery; diversifying content offerings and providing viewers with far greater choice. Mobile broadcast services introduced as part of the Long Term Evolution (LTE) standard, that are to be further enhanced with the release of 5G, do aid in spectrally efficient delivery of popular live multimedia to many mobile devices, but, ultimately rely on all users expressing interest in the same single stream. The research presented herein explores the development of a standards aligned, multi-stream aware framework; allowing mobile network operators the efficiency gains of broadcast whilst continuing to offer personalised experiences to subscribers. An open source, system level simulation platform is extended to support broadcast, characterised and validated. This is followed by the implementation of a Hybrid Unicast Broadcast Synchronisation (HUBS) framework able to dynamically vary broadcast resource allocation. The HUBS framework is then further expanded to make use of scalable video content