Performance evaluation of D2D-based SFN for multicast service delivery in 5G networks

The always increasing demand for group-oriented services challenges wireless network operators to efficiently handle the increased traffic load and the dissimilar channel quality experienced by users in the same multicast group. Long Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-A) represents the most promising wireless system to support group-oriented services. A traditional approach for providing multicast services is the fair yet conservative Conventional Multicast Scheme (CMS) which serves all multicast members with the data rate supported by the receiver with the worst channel conditions. In order to address some of the limitations of the CMS approach, Device-to-Device (D2D) communications can be employed to reach users in the multicast group with poor channel conditions by means of one or more forwarding devices (FD). In this paper we analyze the performance of the D2D-enhanced CMS approach when considering all frame configurations foreseen by the LTE-A standard in order to draw some guidelines in case of video streaming transmission.