Efficient multicast association to improve the throughput in IEEE 802.11 WLAN

This paper deals with the problem of optimal association of stations (STAs) to access points (APs) for mulicast services in IEEE 802.11 WLAN. In a multicast session, all the subscribed STAs receive the multicast data packet at the same data rate (R
_min
) from their respective serving APs. A higher value of R
_min
improves the multicast throughput by completing the ongoing multicast session in lesser time. This also improves the unicast throughput as the cycle duration is shared by the unicast and multicast sessions. To provide multicast services to the STAs, we need to select a minimum cardinality subset of APs as the system message overhead depends on this cardinality. However, such a minimum cardinality subset of APs may not be possible to activate simultaneously due to the limited number of available orthogonal frequency channels. In this paper, we develop a combined greedy algorithm that selects a subset of APs with minimum cardinality for which a conflict-free frequency assignment exists and finds an association between the STAs and the selected APs that maximizes the R
_min
value. Through simulation we have shown that the proposed algorithm selects significantly less number of APs for different R
_min
values in comparison to the well-known metrics for multicast association like RSSI, minimum hop-distance, normalized-cost and in-range STA number.