An enhanced MBMS service provision approach for improved performance in UTRAN

As currently specified by 3GPP for UMTS, MBMS services are provided within a cell, either by P-t-P or by P-t-M transmission mode, but not both at the same time. Our previous work highlighted the inefficiencies that can occur with this approach and proposed the Dual Transmission mode cell (that allows both transmission modes to coexist within the same cell) to address them. This approach, compared to the current 3GPP specified one, achieved major capacity and channel quality gains, however the tradeoffs were small increases in the terminal's battery consumption and uplink noise due to the context reporting request process adopted. In this paper we enhance our previous work and propose a new context reporting request process. Our enhanced approach revealed improvements on the terminal battery consumption and the uplink noise rise, without affecting any of the capacity and link quality gains previously achieved. In addition, it managed to significantly reduce the need for frequent and redundant reporting, which resulted in less processing effort in the RNC, faster decision making, and reduced possibility for uplink congestion. Thus, even in situations where a large number of users are present in the cell, scalability and improved system performance is achieved.