MBMS Service Provisioning in UMTS/WLAN Heterogeneous Architectures

The support of broadcasting and multicasting as an efficient L3-based service poses rigorous requirements to the next generation mobile communication architectures. When IP multicasting has been seriously considered in mobile systems, soon has emerged the proposal of Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Service (MBMS) for 3G networks and beyond. However, with the spreading of versatile heterogeneous wireless systems, like the cooperation of European 3G (UMTS) and Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN), the problem of wireless IP datacasting arises in more complicated ways. In order to extend MBMS for UMTS/WLAN heterogeneous architectures we approach a novel framework along with a suitable and efficient WLAN MAC (Media Access Control) extension. In this work we also evaluate the performance of our proposal using a discrete event simulation environment called OMNeT++.