A cellular communication system for broadcast communication comprises an broadcast transmission augmented with a unicast transmission.

摘要

A cellular communication system, e.g. a 3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE) system, comprising the evolved multimedia broadcast/multicast service (EMBMS) supports a broadcast transmission (610) in at least one of a plurality of communication cells. The cellular communication system comprises at least one base station (210) capable of broadcasting content to at least one wireless communication unit (226) via at least one relay node (RN) (224), the at least one base station being arranged to supplement the broadcast transmission with at least one augmented unicast transmission (605) associated with the broadcast content. The augmented unicast transmission may comprise the broadcast content or additional error coding redundancy bits which may be computed from the broadcast content. The base station may dynamically initiate the augmented unicast transmission and may adjust at least one of its transmit power, data rate, modulation scheme, time/frequency resource and number of redundant physical layer bits in response to prevailing channel conditions, feedback from the RN and transmission quality.