Evaluation of Different Power Saving Techniques for MBMS Services

Over the last years we have witnessed an explosive growth of multimedia computing, wireless communication and applications. Following the rapid increase in penetration rate of broadband services, the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) is currently standardizing the Evolved-Multimedia Broadcast/Multicast Service (E-MBMS) framework of Long Term Evolution (LTE), the successor of Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS). MBMS constitutes a point-to-multipoint downlink bearer service that was designed to significantly decrease the required radio and wired link resources. However, several obstacles regarding the high-power requirements should be overcome for the realization of MBMS. Techniques, such as Macrodiversity Combining and Rate Splitting, could be utilized to reduce the power requirement of delivering multicast traffic to MBMS users. In this paper, we analytically present several power saving techniques and analyze their performance in terms of power consumption. We provide simulation results that reveal the amount of power that is saved and reinforce the need for the usage of such techniques.