Flexible and modular support for multicast rate adaptation in WLANs

The flexibility and virtualization capabilities provided by wireless cards have received significant attention as a means to reduce development costs. In this paper we present a modular architecture that exploits the features provided by emerging PHY and MAC implementations to rapidly develop new rate adaptation algorithms for multicast transmission in wireless LANs. We validate our solution by developing three rate adaptation algorithms that use an innovative sensing mechanism to evaluate the frame reception correlation of the members of the multicast group. The experimental results obtained on a real-life testbed show that our solutions permit to increase the performance of multicast transmissions up to 3x and 5x in terms of throughput and delay with respect to the standard fixed rate approach, reducing losses at the same time.