Estimation of multicast packet loss characteristic due to collision and loss recovery using FEC on distributed infrastructure wireless LANs

Multicast packets are lost when collisions occur on IEEE 802.11 wireless LANs with DCF because the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol does not use a packet loss recovery mechanism for multicast packets. Therefore, an application that uses wireless multicast should be provided with a recovery mechanism. This paper studies the multicast packet loss due to collision with TCP packets on IEEE 802.11b DCF infrastructure wireless LANs. The results of analysis and simulation show that the multicast packet loss ratio has an upper limit, and that FEC is effective for recovering the multicast packet losses.