Hybrid cellular-broadcasting infrastructure systems : radio resource management issues

Sammanfattning: This thesis addresses the problem of low-cost multicast delivery of multimedia content in future mobile networks. The trend towards reuse of existing infrastructure for cellular and broadcasting for building new systems is challenged, with respect to the opportunities for low cost service provision and scalable deployment of networks. The studies outline significant potential of hybrid cellular-broadcasting infrastructure to deliver lower-cost mobile multimedia, compared to conventional telecom or broadcasting systems. Even with simple interworking techniques the achievable cost savings can be significant, at least under some specific settings. The work starts with a foresight study shaped around four scenarios of the future, and continues with the introduction of a high-level framework for radio resource management in Ambient Networks. Two approaches on the hybrid system architecture are considered. The first one assumes different degrees of interworking between conventional cellular and broadcasting systems, in single and multi-operator environments. Second, is a broadcast only system where cellular sites are used for synchronized, complementary transmitters for the broadcasting site. In the first approach, the key issue is the multi-radio resource management, which is strongly affected by the degree of integration between the two networks. Two case studies deal with the problem of delivering, for lowest cost, a data item to a certain number of recipient users. A flexible broadcasting air interface, which offers several transmission data rates that can be dynamically changed, is demonstrated to significantly increase cost efficiency under certain conditions. An interesting result is that real-time monitoring of the user reception conditions is not needed, at least when multicast group is large. This indicates a high degree of integration between cellular and broadcasting networks may not by generally justified by visible cost savings. Scalability of the hybrid infrastructure deployment is the main topic in the second approach. For a DVB-H type of network, the numerical evaluations show that achievement of economies of scale while increasing network capacity and coverage, by employing higher modulation and coding rate or installing new transmission sites, is difficult. Therefore, a technique based on application-layer forward error correction with Raptor codingA is suggested for enabling a flexible trading between system capacity, perceived coverage and delay, in the case of mobile users.