A Novel Local and Hyper-Local Multicast Services Transmission Scheme for Beyond 5G Networks

The efficiency of the broadcast network is impacted by the different types of services that may be transmitted over it. Global services serve users across the entire network, while local services cater to specific regions, and hyper-local services have even narrower coverage. Multimedia Broadcast over a Single-Frequency Network (MBSFN) is typically used for global service transmission while existing literature extensively discusses schemes for transmitting local or hyper-local services with or without Single Frequency Network (SFN) gain. However, these schemes fall short when network-wide requests for only local and hyper-local services are made, leading operators to scale down to either Single Cell-Point to Multipoint (SCPtM) or Multi-Frequency Network (MFN). SCPtM is highly susceptible to interference, and MFN requires substantial amounts of valuable spectrum. They both employ the Least Channel Gain (LCG) strategy for transmitting hyper-local services without SFN gain. Our proposed Local and Hyper-Local Services (LHS) transmission scheme utilizes the knowledge of user distribution and their corresponding radio link channel quality to schedule single or multi-resolution, local or hyper-local services within a three-cell cluster and aims to enhance spectral efficiency and maximize system throughput. It leverages Scalable Video Coding (SVC) in conjunction with Hierarchical Modulation (HM) for transmitting multi-resolution multimedia content to address the problem of heterogeneity amongst the multicast group users. The proposed scheme also employs macro-diversity combining with optimal HM parameters for each gNB catering to a local service area in order to minimize the service outage. System-level simulation results testify to the better performance achieved by the proposed LHS transmission scheme with respect to SCPtM.