A Novel Power Counting Mechanism for Enhanced MBMS Performance in UMTS Networks

One of the key objectives of Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) is the realization of enhanced end-user experience through the provision of rich multimedia services, ensuring in parallel an economical delivery cost for service providers. Multimedia Broadcast/Multicast Services (MBMS) framework of UMTS epitomizes the increasing popularity of such applications by efficiently delivering multimedia traffic to a large number of users and optimizing the radio interface of UMTS networks. For exploiting resource efficiency, MBMS specifications consider the Counting Mechanism which decides whether it is more economic to deliver MBMS multicast traffic over point-to-point (PTP) or point-tomultipoint (PTM) bearers. However, the necessity to further improve MBMS resource efficiency and integrate new technologies such as High Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) stresses the need for an advanced Counting Mechanism. To this direction, in this paper we propose a novel Power Counting Mechanism which performs optimal power resource utilization and incorporates the HSDPA broadband extension of UMTS for enhanced performance.