IP packet header compression and user grouping for LTE Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Services

Abstract

Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Service (MBMS)1 is an efficiency cellular strategy for shared content delivery, widely popular in Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks. Typical multimedia IP packets possess redundantly large headers, relying on Robust Header Compression (ROHC) for efficiency boost. This work investigates the adaptation of ROHC schemes for MBMS. We formulate and solve the optimization problem of transmission efficiency maximization in point-to-multipoint (P-t-M) transmission mode. Based on this solution, we propose a new MBMS scheme, namely point-to-multigroup (P-t-MG) transmission in which MBMS aim user groups. We provide a grouping and parameter optimization algorithm for P-t-MG to achieve high efficiency under total radio resource constraints. Numerical results demonstrate the advantage of the optimized P-t-M and the P-t-MG schemes over conventional MBMS.