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For end-to-end wireless multicast applications like multimedia conferencing, voice over IP and video/audio streaming applications which require reliable transmission of frames within short delivery delay, adding MAC layer H-ARQ (Hybrid Automatic Repeat Request) can enhance reliability and delivery delay. However, IEEE802.11 does not support reliable multicast due to its inability to exchange ACKs with multiple recipients. In this paper, we propose a protocol that enhances WLAN reliability performances by using Adaptive FEC (Forward Error Correction) while maintaining an optimal throughput performance.

For wireless multicast applications like multimedia conferencing, voice over IP and video/audio streaming which require reliable transmission of packets within short delivery delay, adding Foward Error Correction (FEC) can enhance Packet Error Rate (PER) performance under low channel conditions, but cannot guarantee a reliable transmission. However, for applications like file transfer, distributed computing, chat and whiteboard sharing, reliability is crucial to the performance of the application. Reliable FEC or Hybrid Automatic Repeat Request (H-ARQ) can provide reliability, and can be deployed at different levels of the protocol stack. In this paper, we compare the performance of a reliable packet-level FEC protocol and a reliable byte-level FEC protocol through simulation and analytical analysis. Our result show that byte-level FEC can deliver a higher reliability performance in terms of throughput and delivery ratios.

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