Multicast and Broadcast Services Over Mobile Networks: A Survey on Standardized Approaches and Scientific Outcomes

Due to the increasing demand for pervasive video and broadcast-like applications, multicast and broadcast communications are expected to assume an important role in upcoming 5G systems. The current research trend is trying to reuse, extend, or adapt reference transmission strategies already designed for the conventional 4G technology. Nevertheless, apart the two reference and standardized methodologies, i.e., multimedia broadcast/multicast service and single cell-point to multipoint, many technical extensions and novel solutions were published in the literature so far. Therefore, in order to provide a clear overview on available solutions (already standardized or simply extending conventional approaches), the present work provides a comprehensive survey on network architectures, communication protocols, transmission strategies, and optimization algorithms to improve the performance of multicast communications over mobile radio systems. The core of the conducted study represents a structured taxonomy, able to properly classify scientific contributions based on their reference standard, targeted goal, addressed methodology, considered application domain, and obtained results. Taking into account this taxonomy, more than one hundred of scientific contributions are presented, classified, and reviewed. The study of the state-of-the-art is further enhanced with the discussion on important lessons learned, which clearly highlight the pros and cons of any investigated approach. A focus is also provided on the main issues on long term evolution multicasting that need to be better investigated, and determine the possible future research directions on this subject. The final goal of this paper is to support research activities devoted to the identification of promising methodologies, that efficiently support the delivery of real-time and on-demand video contents in a TV-like fashion.