Leader-Based Rate Adaptive Multicasting for Wireless LANs

Abstract

Abstract-Multicasting is useful for various applications such as multimedia broadcasting. In current 802.11, multicast frames are sent as broadcast frames at a low transmission rate without any acknowledgement or binary exponential backoff. This naive multicasting mechanism degrades the performance of not only multicast flows but also unicast flows. In this paper, we propose a new multicasting mechanism based on the leaderbased approach to improve the legacy multicast transmissions, maintaining coexistence with legacy 802.11 devices. Simulations show that our protocol achieves well-balanced performance in terms of reliability, latency, goodput, and transmission fairness in comprehensive environments.

Multicasting multimedia streams in IEEE 802.11 networks: a focus on reliability and rate adaptation

“…If the Leader ID in an IGMP Membership Report broadcast by the AP is 0, a station can figure out that the AP does not support SRM. 2 In Sect. 5.1, how to utilize an unused field of a multicast frame header for this purpose is described, which is compliant with the legacy IEEE 802.11 standard.…”

“…To mitigate this problem, we can use some mechanism such as CTS-to-Self [2]. For example, the AP first transmits a CTS-to-Self frame at a basic rate (1 or 2 Mbit/s).…”

“…Each multicast frame from the AP contains the selected Leader ID in its MAC header. 2 If the Leader ID of a station is equal to the one in the received multicast frame, the station will reply with an ACK frame for the multicast frame. To assign and release an unique Leader ID for each station, we propose a novel Leader ID management protocol which specifies how to leverage IGMP concretely.…”

“…Therefore, the performance of unicast flows with high transmission rates is seriously degraded as multicast flows overwhelm the wireless link bandwidth due to the fixed and low transmission rate. To solve this problem, the previous studies [1,2,7,18] focus on the provisioning of the same channel usage time to all stations. They can lessen the performance anomaly problem.…”

Rate-adaptive multicast video streaming from teams of micro aerial vehicles

“…Existing schemes [12], [13], [14], [15], [16] that address the feedback problem for multicast traffic and adapt the transmission rate require modifications in the medium access control (MAC) layer. The MAC layer of each node joining a multicast group shall be tailored against the requirements of the scheme being used.…”