Energy Efficient Multimedia Delivery Services over LTE/LTE-A

Mobile video services are becoming a dominant traffic category in emerging fourth generation (4G) cellular networks such as the 3GPP Long-Term Evolution (LTE) and LTE-Advanced (LTE-A). In particular, mobile video unicasting services based on 3GPP Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) and multicasting/broadcasting services based on 3GPP evolved Multimedia Multicast/Broadcast Service (eMBMS) will require considerable resources for high-quality service delivery with high coverage probability. Faced with the challenge of energy efficient multimedia service provisioning over LTE/LTE-A, in this paper, we present simple analytical tools for evaluation of average service data rates, bandwidth and energy-consumption requirements applicable for different multimedia delivery services and LTE/LTE-A radio access network (RAN) configurations. Moreover, we introduce and evaluate novel energy and bandwidth performance measures defined per unit of service. As a result, we are able to compare the efficiency of different multimedia service delivery configurations over LTE/LTE-A. In particular, in this paper, as a running example we focus on eMBMS and compare the Energy of Service (EoS) of the two macro-cellular LTE/LTE-A configurations recently proposed in 3GPP: i) a single frequency network eMBMS (SFN-eMBMS), and ii) a single-cell eMBMS (SC-eMBMS). Furthermore, we extend this analysis to eMBMS provisioning over Heterogeneous Networks (HetNets) environment. However, the methodology presented is general and targets light-weight system design and comparison of bandwidth/energy costs of different LTE/LTE-A multimedia service delivery configurations. key words: eMBMS, energy efficiency, video multicast, LTE/LTE-A