TECHNICAL FIELD

The present disclosure relates generally to wireless broadcast systems and, more specifically, to a method and system for using user device feedback to dynamically control the broadcasting of data signals including content to users to effectively improve the overall total performance of the broadcast system.

BACKGROUND

The statements in this section merely provide background information related to the present disclosure and may not constitute prior art.

In many regions, internet service underperforms relative to the amount of content consumption that is desired. That is, many areas of the country and around the world do not have sufficient high-speed internet access. For example, wireless, dial-up, DSL, or satellite services are examples of services that may not provide adequate speed or economical capacity to support the downloading of high quality of video content or other large forms of data in a timely or economic manner. However, over-the-top (OTT) video services are becoming increasingly commonplace in the United States market and globally, rapidly not only offering an attractive alternative to traditional cable bundles but beginning to replace “Pay TV” altogether. However, many consumers across the U.S. and globally, whether in urban areas or in rural areas, either desire to adopt a competitive service to a cable bundle to reduce cost or to gain access to additional features (as in the case of mobility and portability as with wireless services) or to enhance their existing slower speed or lower capacity services to support a viable over-the-top video or data intensive service. Enabling these slower speed or lower capacity services to support high quality OTT video and data delivery is desirable.

A large number of people are dropping traditional cable television service in favor or over-the-top services. This contributes to the volume of data used to watch videos. Nearly half of the approximately 125,000,000 households in the United States now subscribe to at least one video streaming service. By one estimate, the amount of traffic attributable to the most popular video services such as Netflix®, Amazon Prime Video® and iTunes® together account for more than 40% of all peak internet traffic in the U.S. Another 18% is attributable to YouTube®. Ultra-high definition (UHD) content is also beginning to appear on the market. Thus, the increase in internet traffic is expected to grow for the foreseeable future. For Netflix® service, a 5 Mbps is recommended for HD content. However, for ultra-high definition content, a 25 Mbps connection is recommended. Ultra-high definition streams may consume up to 7 GByte per hour.

Today, it is estimated that 20,000,000 Americans lack access to 10 Mbps+ service, and that number grows to roughly 1.6 billion global households. Their options range satellite broadband and long-loop DSL connections for those that can afford it, or a mobile broadband only solution to their smartphones across many of the other parts of the world where even satellite or DSL broadband is unaffordable. Same time, a rapidly growing trend in lower income households, and even more so in the cord-cutting focused youth segments of the population, is using as mobile service as a preferred means to access video data, while shedding the more expensive fixed wired broadband.

The provisioning of increasingly higher speed wireless data connectivity has been the focus of wireless carrier infrastructure growth for several decades, and has accelerated with the rapidly rising demand by consumers to stream video to each or any of their devices, irrespective of where they are. The increasing wireless performance, together with both users' desires to consume more bandwidth intensive video content over the Internet, at lower marginal cost per bit, and wireless providers desire to serve more of the users' demands including in the home and also to large screen devices (i.e., TVs, laptops), is placing a requirement on wireless networks to accommodate a markedly higher level of capacity for handling this exploding video data traffic demand over wireless networks.

Today wireless networks are still approaching video distribution using traditional means, which can be improved upon. Video data traffic is carried over wireless networks at the same time that consumers desire to consume the video data traffic. Since consumers consume data at times driven largely by social structures, with significant consumption happening at the same time across the consumer base including during “prime time” hours, time intervals of significant “peak” consumption are typical and wireless networks often have insufficient capacity to handle peak loads. Further, consumers mostly consume different content than other consumers at any given point of time, precluding efficient use of broadcasting content to users for real-time consumption (since has low relevancy) outside of select live content (i.e., sports events, time-scheduled releases of popular shows).

The 3GPP standard eMBMS feature that was designed to be used for broadcast has struggled to gain adoption with carriers in their deployments in the manner in which it was designed. There are few cases, when instantaneously broadcasting video to many users at the same time, relieves real-time traffic requirements. To complicate the problem, eMBMS also requires designing the broadcast for the worst case user, in a blind manner without feedback, otherwise they would not be successfully served. A single sector carrier is broadcast with a single broad azimuthal antenna beam pattern that must be configured in a low spectral efficiency mode (measured in bits per second per hertz, bps/Hz) to ensure robust transmission to all potential recipients that may be in edge-of-cell or interference-prone locations. As such, broadcasting traffic at worse performance rate and lower efficiency per hertz, than unicasting the traffic, with very few if any users other than the requesting user interested in the real-time data transmission at that time, has rendered wireless broadcasting to a niche application class.

However, consumers consume largely the same long-form content, i.e., blockbuster movies and hit TV series as other consumers, over a longer period of time, so it is possible to “predict” what a consumer would consume with higher accuracy if the real-time requirement is relaxed to “over 3 months” or some other such longer than real-time timeframe. A system that would identify the content generally desired by consumers, that would broadcast the content over the networks in advance of the time it is desired to be consumed by consumers that would store the content locally at the consumers' premises, and serve the content to consumers over an unconstrained medium (i.e., home WiFi network), would be able to relieve wireless networks from significant amount of video data content and corresponding congestion, since broadcasting to many users at once, even done to “predict” future consumption, can be dramatically more spectrally efficient than unicasting something to only one user at the time that the user requests the content. Further, if such a system performed its broadcast distribution during the times when the wireless networks had “spare capacity”, not needed for real-time traffic needs, the system would be able to relieve wireless networks even further.

To address the increasing demand for wireless capacity density, carriers are looking to 5G and “massive MIMO” types of solutions. Many of the 5G solutions require increasingly larger channel bandwidths, found at higher and higher frequencies. As these frequencies increase, the relative antenna sizes per element decrease inversely with frequency. This has helped to enable more complex active antenna array systems with many more elements that, with the proper computational processing, can create “massive MIMO” basestations. These basestations can create many smaller, more focused antenna beams, which allow the spatial re-use of the same frequencies more than once in what was routinely a 120 degree azimuthal sector.

Some academic papers discuss the concept of broadcast in a “massive MIMO” environment, with the conclusion that the superposition of unicast beam solutions can provide a representation of a broadcast beam, but that beam is no more spectrally efficient than providing n-copies of the desired content to the n-number of users using n-number of unicast beams, i.e., it does not create a breakthrough over unicast in such an environment.

SUMMARY

The present disclosure enables new use of wireless infrastructure to much more effectively meet the rising video content demand using a broadcast enabled model. While the system is envisioned for fixed/residential customers, other non-fixed location devices, portable and mobile devices may benefit from the teachings herein.

In one aspect of the disclosure, a method of operating a communication system includes communicating a sounding signal to a plurality of devices through a first antenna array coupled to a basestation. The method further includes, in response to the sounding signal, communicating a response signal to the basestation from each of the plurality of devices, from the response signal determining device data comprising a device location, a signal strength of the sounding signal and phase information of the sounding signal, grouping the plurality of devices into a first group, generating first transmit beamforming weights for the first group to shape the output of the first antenna array to communicate a data signal to the first group and broadcasting the data signal to the first group through a wireless signal from the first antenna array using the first transmit beamforming weights and nulls.

In another aspect of the disclosure, a processing unit coupled to a basestation includes an antenna array associated with the basestation communicating a sounding signal to a plurality of devices. An optimization circuit receives a response signal from each of the plurality of devices and, from the response signal, determines device data comprising a device location, a signal strength of the sounding signal and phase information of the sounding signal. The optimization circuit groups the plurality of devices into a first group based on the device data. A beamformer generates first transmit beamforming weights for the first group to shape the output of the first antenna array to communicate a data signal to the first group. The antenna array broadcasts the data signal to the first group through a wireless signal from using the first transmit beamforming weights and nulls.

Further areas of applicability will become apparent from the description provided herein. It should be understood that the description and specific examples are intended for purposes of illustration only and are not intended to limit the scope of the present disclosure.

