Broadcast and Multicast Transmission Over HSDPA

In this paper, we describe the novel concept of broadcast and multicast (BCMC) transmission over high speed downlink packet access (HSDPA), a shared high-speed packet data channel on the downlink defined in the Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) standard. We show that the unique features of HSDPA such as link adaptation, channel-sensitive scheduling, and hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) can be used to provide performance gains over conventional multimedia broadcast multicast service (MBMS) transmission on the forward access channel (FACH) channel. We address various aspects of system design and performance in the design of a BCMC system over HSDPA, and present a detailed performance analysis using system level simulations. Some of the main objectives of our BCMC design are to enable broadcast and multicast services on HSDPA networks without requiring significant changes to the HSDPA standard in 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), and to ensure that the solution is backward-compatible with Release 5 HSDPA mobile devices. (c) 2009 Alcatel-Lucent.