Analysis of blocking rate and bandwidth usage of mobile IPTV services in wireless cellular networks

Mobile IPTV services over wireless cellular networks become more and more popular, owing to the significant growth in access bandwidth of wireless cellular networks such as 3G/4G and WiMAX. However, the spectrum resources of wireless cellular networks is rare. How to enhance the spectral efficiency of mobile networks becomes an important issue. Unicast, broadcast, and multicast are the most important transport schemes for offering mobile IPTV services over wireless cellular networks. Therefore, bandwidth usages and blocking rates of unicast, broadcast, and multicast IPTV services were analyzed and compared in this paper. Simulations were also conducted to validate the analytical results. Numerical results demonstrate that the presented analysis is correct, and multicast scheme achieves the best bandwidth usage and blocking rate performance, relative to the other two schemes.