MBMS service provision and its challenges

The history of broadcast within the mobile environment dates back to the cell broadcast service (CBS) where traffic information is broadcast over the radio interface. CBS however cannot satisfy the bandwidth and QoS required to send streaming services which include video, text and speech. The multicast broadcast multimedia service (MBMS) is a packet switched based service that extends the concept of broadcast services, in order to address the shortcomings of CBS. Most importantly it introduces the concept of a multicast service in UMTS. One of the main differences between a multicast service and a broadcast service is the fact that multicast services are subscribed to. MBMS services are seen as an attractive revenue generator for big companies broadcasting short adverts, over the mobile phone. Within the 3GPP standards group there is a lot of work ongoing to define the appropriate standards for MBMS service provision. The service requirements are complete; however there are a lot of challenges facing the mobile network architecture. This paper explores some of the technical challenges that are being addressed within the standardisation groups and presents some suggestions on the way forward in some of these areas.