Throughput Analysis between Unicast and MBSFN from Link Level to System Level

Public safety incidents typically involve significant amount of group traffic. This paper initializes our study in exploring the potential spectrum savings and improvement in first responders experience by using Multicast Broadcast Single Frequency Network (MBSFN) to serve group traffic among first responders. Towards this goal, this paper proposes a comprehensive methodology that closely follows The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) specifications and considers unicast multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) and MBSFN without MIMO. High fidelity Block Error Rate (BLER) curves for both MBSFN and unicast are generated, and Signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) points to switch Channel Quality Indicators (CQIs) are extracted and analyzed. Several simulation scenarios have been designed and the empirical results are analyzed.