  Forthcoming 5G New Radio (NR) systems will be asked to handle a huge number
of devices accessing or delivering "resource-hungry" and high-quality services.
In view of this, the new 5G Radio Access Technology (RAT) aims to support, in
next releases, Multimedia Broadcast/Multicast Service Single Frequency Network
(MBSFN) to enable the simultaneous delivery of the same content to a set of
users covered by different cells. According to MBSFN, all cells belonging to
the same MBSFN Area are synchronized in time and the MBSFN transmission occurs
over the same radio resources. In such a way, the same content flow is
delivered by several cells to all the receivers in the MBSFN Area. A further
means to enhance the network coverage and provide high data rate and low
latency in future 5G-enabled MBSFN networks is Device-to-Device (D2D)
connectivity. Along these lines, in this paper we propose a D2D-aided MBSFN
Area Formation (D2D-MAF) algorithm to dynamically create MBSFN Areas with the
aim to improve the system aggregate data rate while satisfying all user
requests. The proposed D2D-MAF foresees that users could receive the service
through either MBSFN, or D2D, or unicast transmissions. Performance evaluation
results, carried out under a wide range of conditions, testify to the high
effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.
