Support of multiple content variants in the multimedia broadcast/multicast service

The Multimedia Broadcast/Multicast Service (MBMS) was designed to enable the mass distribution of multimedia content in 3rd Generation and beyond cellular networks. If such services are to become commercially viable, they must be able to efficiently support widely heterogeneous user requirements, for example, due to terminal limitations and cost constraints. This paper presents an MBMS extension that allows multiple variants of the same content to be economically distributed to heterogeneous receivers, explicitly taking into account the possibility of using either dedicated or common radio channels. We describe our extended multiple content variant MBMS model by explaining the modifications that it imposes on the standard MBMS model, as well as the manner in which it can be combined with layered coding. We also present an analytical evaluation of our approach against alternatives based on the standard MBMS in terms of control and user plane overhead, and compare the analytical predictions with detailed simulation results. Both the analysis and the simulations indicate that our proposal can indeed satisfy heterogeneous user requirements, while consuming considerably lower resources than the standard‐based alternatives. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.