The Convergence Opportunity for ATSC 3.0 and 5G NR Multicast Broadcast Service

Broadcast Engineering and IT Conference , Core Education Collection , Core Education Collection: Connect Series

Originally Aired - Monday, April 15 | 3:00 PM - 3:20 PM PT

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Over the last 20 years, content consumption on mobile networks has evolved from voice/text to predominantly multimedia. This trend continues unabated. For live sports, a "Broadcast" mode of operation is much more efficient when a single stream is consumed simultaneously by multiple users. ATSC 3.0 represents a best-of-breed, state of the art broadcast standard, clearly outperforming standalone LTE-based approaches such as 5G Broadcast. Mobile network operators have standardized multicast broadcast modes for 3GPP LTE-based 5G broadcast in Release 17, but the result is a suboptimal mobile standard given its limitations. This paper proposes a new approach to broadcast/broadband convergence – not based on 5G Broadcast but rather on heterogeneous network use cases for ATSC 3.0 and 5G New Radio.

This paper will describe the 5G system architecture using the 5G Core and 5G New Radio (NR) Radio Access Network (RAN). In this scenario, the 5G Multicast and Broadcast Service (MBS) includes a unicast component that provides improved Quality of Service to complement the multicast broadcast. However, 5G MBS currently only supports a single cell service topology, with no support for larger single frequency network (SFN) configurations. This creates an opportunity to converge the 5G RAN layer 2 with an optimized and aligned broadcast RAN using ATSC 3.0.

The ATSC 3.0 physical layer standards are flexible, extensible, and efficient, within 1dB of the Shannon capacity. The present ATSC 3.0 suite of standards currently lacks the L1/L2 signaling that would be required for efficient battery-powered services, as well as other features needed to interoperate with 5G MBS at the Layer 2 RAN level. These gaps can be filled by proposed extensions using the A/321 Bootstrap to provide for higher efficiencies.

These extensions could open opportunities for RAN convergence between 5G NR and ATSC 3.0 for new multicast broadcast service paradigms, complementing 5G NR capabilities and adding efficiency for wide-area broadcast events. Ultimately, the goal is for the receiver to be as efficient and lightweight as possible while providing fast service discovery, battery-efficient reception, and the flexibility to deliver harmonized L1/L2 signaling via broadband for converged services.