Global throughput maximization of a hybrid unicast-broadcast network for linear services

An exponential growth of the mobile data traffic is expected in future networks. The reason of this growth is related to the increasing popularity of linear services such as mobile TV, live and sports events, which may lead to the delivery of the same contents to a large audience. Recent studies have shown that network cooperation is a promising candidate to deal with such an issue. This paper investigates, from a planning perspective, the optimization of a hybrid unicast/broadcast network for linear services. We introduce an analytical approach with the aim of stating an optimization problem on the hybrid network configuration, namely in terms of the sharing between the unicast and broadcast modes to deliver a particular service. We show by simulation the existence of an optimal operation point which leads to the maximization of the overall throughput of the hybrid network under the constraint of a minimum service success rate.