A Dynamic MBSFN Area Formation Algorithm for Multicast Service Delivery in 5G NR Networks

The ever-increasing demand for high-quality video contents over mobile networks is pushing Telco operators towards the design of new delivery solutions. 3GPP has defined Multimedia Broadcast/Multicast Service Single Frequency Network (MBSFN) to enable the simultaneous transmission of the same content within multiple cells over the same radio resources, with improved network scalability and spectral efficiency. This paper proposes a Dynamic MBSFN Area Formation (DMAF) algorithm that suitably selects the adjacent synchronized cells to include in any MBSFN Area of a 5G New Radio (NR) system to the purpose of increasing the system Aggregate Data Rate while avoiding user outage. The proposed algorithm dynamically creates MBSFN Areas by leveraging the multicast "subgrouping" paradigm for Scalable Video Coding (SVC) traffic delivery. Cells are grouped into different MBSFN Areas and any cell can be part of Disjoint MBSFN Area or Overlapping MBSFN Area. Each Overlapping MBSFN Area broadcasts a Base video flow at a given quality level to all users, whereas Enhancement Layers are only delivered to users with better channel conditions. Simulation results testify to the better performance achieved by the proposed algorithm w.r.t. other schemes available from the literature.