Reliable MAC layer multicast in IEEE 802.11 wireless networks

Abstract

Multicast/broadcast is an important service primitive in networks. It is supported by all IEEE 802.x standards, including 802.11. The IEEE 802.11 multicast/broadcast protocol is based on the basic access procedure of Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance (CSMA/CA). This protocol does not provide any media access control (MAC) layer recovery on multicast/broadcast frames. As a result, the reliability of the multicast/broadcast service is reduced owing to the increased probability of lost frames resulting from interference or collisions. Recently, a few MAC protocols have been proposed to enhance the reliability and the efficiency of the 802.11 multicast/broadcast protocol. In this paper, we observe that these protocols are still unreliable or inefficient. To redress the problems of reliability and efficiency, we propose a reliable Batch Mode Multicast MAC protocol (BMMM), which in most cases reduces the number of contention phases from n to 1, where n is the number of intended receivers in the multicast/broadcast. This considerably reduces the time required for a multicast/broadcast. We then propose a Location Aware Multicast MAC protocol (LAMM), which uses station location information to further improve upon BMMM. Extensive analysis and simulation results validate the reliability and efficiency of our multicast MAC protocols. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

A Single-Hop Broadcasting Method Based on Busy Tone

“…With RTS/CTS handshake, source node and destination node interact with short control messages RTS and CTS to reserve channel before sending data message. The broadcasting protocols use RTS/CTS to reserve channel include BSMA protocol [1] , BMW protocol [2] , BMMM protocol [3] , etc. With such broadcasting protocols, source node usually handshake with each destination node one by one, therefore source node should maintain a neighbor nodes list.…”

High throughput MAC layer multicasting over time-varying channels

“…Prior research in wireless multicast and broadcast has focused on the transport layer [17,18], network layer [19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27] and MAC layer [5,6,7,8,9,10,11,23,28,29,30,31]. Time-varying channels and rate control has been studied by researchers for unicast transmissions [13,14,15].…”

“…BMW [6] proposes an approach for reliable multicasting using a round-robin approach that amortizes the cost of querying each node for ensuring reliability, but it can introduce arbitrary long latency for data packets. The BMMM [7] approach increases reliability of the MAC layer, but it is not fully scalable. Several approaches [8,9,10] use busy-tone on a separate channel to implement multicast reliability, but the use of a secondary channel increases the hardware complexity.…”

Efficient Multicast Scheme based on Hybrid ARQ and Busy Tone for Multimedia Traffic in Wireless LANs

“…Various protocols have been proposed to enhance the reliability of multicast transmissions for the IEEE 802.11-based wireless networks [4,5,6,7,8,9]. They can be classified into two categories: one is based on ACK [4,5,6,7] and the other is based on leader [8,9].…”

“…They can be classified into two categories: one is based on ACK [4,5,6,7] and the other is based on leader [8,9]. In the ACK-based protocols, a sender retransmits data packets until it receives all the ACK packets from all receivers.…”