Overview of Physical Layer Enhancement for 5G Broadcast in Release 16

3GPP is now carrying forward the development of the point to multipoint transmission mode of 5G on the basis of the cellular infrastructure and standard. Since the dedicated proposal for multimedia broadcast multicast system (MBMS) was approved, the MBMS technologies are evolving with the update of the requirements from 3G to 5G. This paper reviews the latest progress during the evolved MBMS standardization, which focuses on the LTE-based 5G terrestrial broadcast mode. Some agreements in terms of two widely discussed topics during 3GPP meetings, cell acquisition subframe (CAS) enhancement and numerology refinement, are presented. The enhancement of CAS and the update of numerology aim to deal with the service outage issue in the case of covering large area and serving high-mobility users. To verify the improvement brought by the CAS enhancement and the new numerology, simulations from system level and link level are carried out by several organizations and the representative results are presented and analyzed in this paper.