Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Robert Ruemmler currently works for Accenture AG, Switzerland as a consultant for leading Swiss banks. Robert holds a PhD from King's College London, United Kingdom (2005, Thesis: On the Distribution of Software to End-User Terminals in Third-Generation Mobile Networks). His research interests include Multicast in third-generation networks, IP multicast, software download to the mobile terminals, and software-defined radio. He has been actively collaborating with leading companies in mobile communications industry as part of European Commission-sponsored research projects.

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A hands-on tutorial on multicast in third-generation networks!

In this book, the authors describe how to perform multicast, the one-to-many delivery of data to a group of destinations, in third-generation mobile networks.

The authors provide an overview of the services that can be realized with multicast in third-generation networks, describe the mechanisms required to support these services and highlight the performance of several multicast mechanisms. The focus of this book is on multicast in UMTS and CDMA2000 networks, the dominant third-generation network standards. In addition to describing the standards for multicast, the authors also provide extensive performance results of multicast in third-generation networks.

Key Features:

•Provides an in-depth review of the fundamentals of multicast

•Describes in detail the MBMS and BCMCS standards for multicast in UMTS and CDMA2000 networks, respectively

•Provides a comprehensive overview of the services that can be realized with multicast in third-generation networks

•Highlights the performance of multicast in third-generation networks

•Investigates how multicast can be achieved in heterogeneous networks consisting of cellular and broadcast networks

This book is an invaluable resource for professional engineers and researchers working in the area of third-generation networks. Postgraduate and graduate students on networking and communications courses will also find this book an insightful and valuable reference.

Aus dem Klappentext

A hands-on tutorial on multicast in third-generation networks!

In this book, the authors describe how to perform multicast, the one-to-many delivery of data to a group of destinations, in third-generation mobile networks.

The authors provide an overview of the services that can be realized with multicast in third-generation networks, describe the mechanisms required to support these services and highlight the performance of several multicast mechanisms. The focus of this book is on multicast in UMTS and CDMA2000 networks, the dominant third-generation network standards. In addition to describing the standards for multicast, the authors also provide extensive performance results of multicast in third-generation networks.

Key Features:

•Provides an in-depth review of the fundamentals of multicast

•Describes in detail the MBMS and BCMCS standards for multicast in UMTS and CDMA2000 networks, respectively

•Provides a comprehensive overview of the services that can be realized with multicast in third-generation networks

•Highlights the performance of multicast in third-generation networks

•Investigates how multicast can be achieved in heterogeneous networks consisting of cellular and broadcast networks

This book is an invaluable resource for professional engineers and researchers working in the area of third-generation networks. Postgraduate and graduate students on networking and communications courses will also find this book an insightful and valuable reference.

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Multicast in Third-Generation Mobile Networks

John Wiley & Sons

Chapter One

This book focuses on the deployment of multicast in third-generation networks. Multicast is the efficient delivery of data to a group of destinations simultaneously. With multicast, messages are delivered as much as possible only once over each link of the network, creating copies only when the links to the destinations split.

In this chapter, we firstly provide an introduction to cellular mobile communication systems, in particular with respect to the features that distinguish the different generations of mobile communication systems, from analog first-generation to the fourth-generation systems currently in development. Then, we describe several fundamental aspects of data networking that are relevant for multicast. This is followed by an overview of how multicast can be achieved in data networks. We then introduce the basics of Internet Protocol (IP) multicast, the standard for multicast in internetworks. A more detailed description of IP multicast is provided in Chapter 2. Finally, we describe several existing mechanisms for carrying out multicast in third-generation networks. Several of these multicast mechanisms are described in much more detail in later chapters.

1.1 Cellular Mobile Communication Systems

The mobile communications industry is a relatively young industry. The basic technological concept of the industry lies in using radio waves to transmit data and connect users. Radio is the transmission of signals by modulation of electromagnetic waves with frequencies below those of visible light. Electromagnetic radiation travels by means of oscillating electromagnetic fields that pass through the air and the vacuum of space. Information is carried by systematically changing or modulating some property of the radiated waves, such as amplitude, frequency or phase. When radio waves pass an electrical conductor, the oscillating fields induce an alternating current in the conductor. This can be detected and transformed into sound or other signals that carry information.

The concept of using radio waves for communication dates back to the second half of the nineteenth century, when the German scientist Heinrich Rudolf Hertz demonstrated in 1888 that an electric spark of sufficient intensity at the emitting end could be captured by an appropriately designed receiver and induce action at a distance. This proved for the first time that electromagnetic waves propagate through the air and have the same properties as light. His English forerunner James Clark Maxwell had foreseen this a few years earlier in 1864. Maxwell's theory of electromagnetic fields claimed the existence of electromagnetic waves and presented four mathematical formulae known today as Maxwell's equations, a set of fundamental equations governing electromagnetism.

Nikola Tesla first demonstrated the feasibility of wireless communications in 1893. He holds the US patent for the invention of the radio, defined as the wireless transmission of data. Guglielmo Marconi demonstrated the use of radio for wireless communications by equipping ships with life-saving wireless communications and by establishing the first commercial transatlantic radio service in 1907. Today, the use of radio takes many forms, including wireless and mobile communication of all types, as well as radio broadcasting.

1.1.1 The Cellular Concept

The design objective of early mobile communication systems was to achieve a large coverage area by using a single, high-power transmitter with an antenna mounted on a tall tower, transmitting on a single frequency. While this approach achieved very good coverage, it also meant that it was impossible to reuse the same frequency throughout the system, since any attempts to achieve frequency reuse would result in interference.

The cellular concept was a major breakthrough in solving the problem of spectral congestion and user capacity. It offered very high capacity with limited spectrum without any major technological changes. The cellular concept is a system-level idea that calls for replacing a single, high-power transmitter with many low-power transmitters, each providing coverage to only a small portion of the service area, referred to as a cell. Each base station is allocated a portion of the total number of channels available to the entire system, and nearby base stations are assigned different groups of channels so that all the available channels are assigned to a relatively small number of neighbouring base stations.

The mobile transceivers (also referred to as mobile phones, mobile stations, mobile terminals, handsets or devices) exchange radio signals with any number of base stations. Mobile phones are not attached to a particular base station, but may make use of any one of the base stations provided by the company that operates the corresponding network. The ensemble of base stations covers the landscape in such a way that the user can travel around and carry on a phone call without interruption, possibly making use of more than one base station. The procedure of changing a base station at cell boundaries is called handover.

Communication from the Mobile Station (MS) to the Base Station (BS) takes place on the uplink channel or reverse link, and from BS to MS on the downlink channel or forward link. To sustain a bidirectional commmunication between a mobile terminal and a base station, transmission resources must be provided both in the uplink and downlink directions. This can happen either through Frequency-Division Duplex (FDD), whereby uplink and downlink channels are assigned on separate frequencies, or through Time-Division Duplex (TDD), where uplink and downlink transmissions occur on the same frequency, but alternate in time.

FDD is efficient in the case of symmetric traffic. Also, FDD makes radio planning easier and more efficient, since base stations do not interfere with each other as they transmit and receive in different sub-bands. TDD has a strong advantage in the case where the asymmetry of the uplink and downlink data speed is variable. As the amount of uplink data increases, more bandwidth can dynamically be allocated to that, and as it shrinks it can be taken away. Another advantage is that the uplink and downlink radio paths are likely to be very similar in the case of a slow-moving system.

1.1.2 Propagation Impairments in Cellular Systems

The design of cellular systems is particularly challenging because of the adverse propagation conditions of the radio channel. Three main propagation impairments are usually distinguished. These are pathloss, slow fading or shadowing and fast fading or multipath fading (Brand and Aghvami, 2002).

The pathloss describes the average signal attenuation as a function of the distance between transmitter and receiver, which includes the free-space attenuation as one component, but also other factors come into play in cellular communications, resulting in an environment-dependent pathloss behaviour. Shadowing or slow fading describes slow signal fluctuations, which are typically caused by large structures, such as big buildings, obstructing the propagation paths. Fast or multipath fading is caused by the fact that signals propagate from transmitter to receiver through multiple paths, which can add at the receiver...