Leader-Based Multicast Service in IEEE 802.11v Networks

With the advent of various multimedia streaming applications requiring reliability and high bandwidth, multicasting in wireless LANs has been gaining more attentions as the supported bit rate increases. However, according to the specification of the IEEE 802.11 standard, broadcast/multicast frames are transmitted at a fixed and low bit rate due to the absence of a feedback mechanism such as ACK. This simple broadcasting technique with no feedback signal raises some issues; reliability, efficiency and fairness. In this paper, hence, we propose a framework for multicasting termed Leader-Based Multicast Service (LBMS) to alleviate those limitations. LBMS consists of a leader-based transmission and feedback mechanism for multicasting by extending the IEEE 802.11v standard, which is the next-generation standard for network management. Also, we try to support legacy 802.11 stations can still participate in multicasting. Simulation exhibits that the gain of the proposed multicasting scheme increases as (i) more stations compete for the channel, and (ii) the wireless channel condition becomes poorer.