Towards NR MBMS: A Flexible Partitioning Method for SFN Areas.

The demand for multimedia services is increasing at an astonishing speed. To deal with the overwhelming data traffic, approaches such as extending available bandwidth are proposed in wireless communication technology. Apart from the enlargement of bandwidth, the enhancement of the efficiency of resource usage is also grabbing the eye. 3GPP has introduced MBMS as a solution to improve the efficiency of resource usage since LTE release 8. Although going through many further enhancements in the recent releases, MBMS still needs modification to meet the requirements for applications in the future. Hence, for the emerging NR MBMS, more flexible network structure, deployment, and resource usage are the main topics for enhancements. In this paper, we identify that the system performance can be improved by adjusting the SFN area with the existence of inter-bearer interference. By allocating the same resources to different SFN areas, the system performance enhances in some cases. As such, we propose a graph-based solution called GGPA to address the problem of utility optimization. After an exclusion stage and a merging stage, GGPA outputs a result which partitions a given topology into multiple non-overlapping SFNs. The simulation results show that GGPA attains the sub-optimality in each identified scenario; in addition, it consumes less calculation time compared with exhaustive search. With the dynamic configuration of MBSFN areas resulting from GGPA, the NR MBMS could achieve better resource efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]