E-MBMS with clustering of mobile terminals in LTE networks

Abstract

The Long Term Evolution (LTE) standard has been recently released to overcome the bandwidth constraints facing 3G wireless networks due to the increased demand of emerging multimedia applications. LTE has adopted Or- thogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) as an accessing scheme due to its immunity to inter-symbol interference and frequency selective fading. With the scarce available bandwidth resources and the limited battery capacity of Mobile Terminals (MTs), there is a need to develop low-complexity optimized resource allocation schemes that can enhance LTE network performance and re- duce MTs' energy consumption. This thesis deals with enhancement techniques to improve the efficiency of the Evolved Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Service (E-MBMS) in LTE networks. In particular, we propose and study several sub-optimal algorithms to cluster the MTs within a cell into multicasting groups in order to control the bit rate per cluster and minimize the overall energy con- sumption from the batteries of the MTs. We present performance results for various scenarios and quantify the potential gains of the proposed algorithms.