MEDIA STREAMING WITH HIGH RATE AVAILABILITY

摘要

A system and method for media streaming in a scenario where very high bitrate wireless service is available within a macro cell through small cells. When a mobile device is in a small cell, a base station may download the multimedia content onto the mobile device at the high bitrate instead of streaming the content at a low bitrate. The mobile device cannot misuse the content made available through the download because its ability to de-scramble the downloaded information is made time dependent by a two-stage scrambling process at the base station that keeps the information scrambled until it is ready to be consumed. The base station withholds from the mobile device information related to de-scrambling of the received content until the appropriate time. Such withheld information includes time-varying decryption keys, which control the timing of decryption and are supplied to the mobile device in a temporally sequential manner.

主权项

1. A method of delivering multimedia content to a mobile device operating in a macro cell in a cellular network that supports a first bitrate and a second bitrate for transmitting the multimedia content to the mobile device, wherein the method comprises performing the following using a network entity in the cellular network:
streaming the multimedia content to the mobile device at the first bitrate, wherein the first bitrate is available throughout the macro cell and wherein the second bitrate is available only over a small cell within the macro cell and is substantially higher than the first bitrate; and upon detecting that the mobile device is present in the small cell, delivering (46) the multimedia content to the mobile device at the second bitrate instead of streaming at the first bitrate.