5G Radio Access Network Architecture for Terrestrial Broadcast Services

3GPP LTE eMBMS Release 14 specifies the architecture providing Terrestrial Broadcast services from the conventional High-Power High-Tower broadcast infrastructure. The 5G New Radio has so far focused on the unicast communications architecture in the Radio Access Network. Given the design principle of RAN architecture developments as enhancing the 5G unicast architecture to enable an efficient selection between unicast and multicast/broadcast transmission modes, we propose an enhanced Next Generation RAN architecture based on 3GPP Release 15 and the architectural and functional enhancements that are aiming at the delivery of multicast and Terrestrial Broadcast services within the same architecture. This paper elaborates the proposed architecture, its deployment and procedure, as well as technical enablers such as RAN Broadcast / Multicast Areas mechanism that allows delivery of multicast and broadcast services wherever needed. The resulting Cloud-RAN architecture approach can adapt to a wide variety of requirements and Quality of Service targets defined according to user demands, traffic flows, network operators and service providers.