On The Energy Efficiency of Hybrid Unicast-Broadcast Networks for Mobile TV Services

An exponential growth of the mobile data traffic is expected in future networks. The reason of this growth is related to the increasing popularity of linear services such as mobile TV, live and sports events, which may lead to the delivery of the same contents to a large audience. With this mobile data traffic explosion, the power demand of future wireless networks is predicted to dramatically increase. This energy consumption issue, if unaddressed, may lead to the restriction of many new services. Based on these facts, recent studies have shown that network cooperation is a promising candidate to deal with such issues. This paper investigates, from an energy efficiency point of view, the performances of using a hybrid unicast/broadcast network to deliver linear services to mobile and portable devices. Results show that cooperation will decrease the total power consumption of the hybrid network.