Scalable push fi le delivery with MBMS

MBMS push services give operators the ability to deliver multimedia content, simultaneously, to all users in a specifi c location, without overloading a mobile network. tent increase proportionally with the number of subscribers and the size of the transferred content. The scalability problem can be solved by using broadcast technologies for pushing content in the form of fi les. Popular push services can use broadcast distribution technology to complement existing unicast schemes. The resources needed to distribute a fi le are independent of the number of subscribers , and the time needed to reach all subscribers depends only on fi le size. By defi ning separate broadcast channels for different services, it is possible to let users opt-in to the content of their choice. This provides a degree of personalization. Multimedia broadcast/multicast service (MBMS) is the native broadcast technology of third-generation mobile system (3G) networks. 1 It offers two delivery methods: streaming and download. Streaming is typically used for mobile TV services, while download (here called MBMS push fi le delivery service) is used for distributing content in fi les of any size and arbitrary format. The use of MBMS for mobile TV has been described in a previous article. 2 For the purpose of this article, we note that the MBMS push fi le delivery service is not orthogonal to mobile TV but rather it is a key enabler for the mass-market distribution of podcast TV as part of a rich mobile TV offering. What makes MBMS particularly well suited for push services is an effective paging mechanism that can selectively wake up terminals when a transmission is about to start. This allows terminals to remain in standby mode (preserving battery capacity) while waiting for a transmission. As well, MBMS allows precise control of the broadcast area of any transmission, from one cell up to the entire network. Push services are popular on the internet and in mobile environments. Internet push services often use podcast mechanisms, while mobile push services use SMS and WAP-push. Technical realizations today are based on dedicated point-to-point delivery. This article presents MBMS push fi le services as a scalability extension to unicast services. MBMS is thus used as a " capacity booster " for distributing popular content services. Push services, which provide content to mobile phones without direct user involvement, have long been of interest to mobile operators. The most common technologies used to …