Power Counting for Optimized Capacity in MBMS Enabled UTRAN

MBMS bearer services can be provided in each cell by either Point-to-Point or Point-to-Multipoint transmission mode but for efficiency a decision has to be made between the two approaches. Initially, the fundamental criterion used to make this decision was the number of MBMS users in a cell (UE Counting). In this paper, the authors extend their previous work, which proposed the power transmitted by the Base Station (BS) as the channel switching criterion (Power Counting). They evaluate their approach and illustrate its capability to dynamically adapt to continuously varying cell conditions by selecting the transmission mode in a more efficient way, preserving in this way the network's resources. At the same time they demonstrate the limitations of the conventional approach, in terms of radio resource efficiency.