Power Counting for optimized capacity in MBMS enabled UTRAN

Abstract

MBMS bearer services can be provided in each cell by either Point-to-Point or Point-to-Multipoint transmission mode but for efficiency a decision has to be made between the two approaches. Initially, the fundamental criterion used to make this decision was the number of MBMS users in a cell (UE Counting). In this paper we extend our previous work, which proposed the power transmitted by the Base Station (BS) as the channel switching criterion (Power Counting). We evaluate our approach and illustrate its capability to dynamically adapt to continuously varying cell conditions by selecting the transmission mode in a more efficient way, preserving in this way the network's resources. At the same time we demonstrate the limitations of the conventional approach, in terms of radio resource efficiency. We show that by having the power used by the BS as the limiting factor we achieve optimized capacity during the transmission of MBMS bearer services in UTRAN. © 2008 IEEE.