A case for using MBMS in geographical networking

Mobile communications are spreading at a fast pace, from telephony to vertical applications such as healthcare, transportation or energy. In the case of transportation, their target is usually a limited geographical area. Geographical networking is currently under study, with proposals for identifying the target area by adding a geographical enhancement to the IP protocol. In this paper, we propose to complete this kind of solution by defining some cross-layer cooperation and an abstraction framework where networking and link layers contribute to improve the efficiency of the geographical coverage and enable this feature in all types of multimode terminals, either ITS (Intelligent Transport Systems) vehicle stations or user personal handheld devices. This system is best suited for applications involving the broadcast of periodic messages, for example when a short-term event has to be covered. It is described using the MBMS (Multicast/Broadcast Multimedia Service) and the multicast/broadcast functional entities standardised by the 3GPP for the cellular networks, but it is generic enough to be applied to other types of access networks under some conditions.