Balancing between power optimization and Iub efficiency in MBMS enabled UMTS networks

Abstract

Multicast transmission is one of the major goals for Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (UMTS) that motivated the 3 rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) to launch the Multimedia Broadcast/Multicast Service (MBMS) framework. MBMS is a key framework that constitutes a significant step towards the so-called Mobile Broadband by efficiently utilizing network and radio resources, both in the core network and more importantly, in the UMTS Terrestrial Radio Access Network (UTRAN). One of most important problems that MBMS is currently facing is the assignment of the appropriate transport channel for the transmission of MBMS data. This paper proposes an alternative solution to the problem of efficient transport channel selection. In particular, we introduce a costbased scheme for the efficient radio bearer selection that minimizes the delivery cost of the multicast data. In our approach, the telecommunication cost over the most crucial interfaces of UMTS is calculated and based on this cost, the appropriate radio bearer is selected. © 2008 International Federation for Information Processing.