A Novel Association Control Strategy for Supporting Multiple Multicast Sessions in WLANs

Multicast is an important service relied upon by many applications in Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs), which unfortunately is limited by the subscribing station with the lowest data rate. A key approach to address this problem is to employ an association control strategy to ensure stations are organized in a manner that optimizes a given objective. To this end, this paper studies the NP-hard, Multiple Multicast Sessions (MMS) problem. It proposes a novel greedy algorithm that aims to minimize the average APs load. Simulation results show that our algorithm reduces the average APs load by up to 70.4% as compared to prior approaches.