Multicasting multimedia streams in IEEE 802.11 networks: a focus on reliability and rate adaptation

摘要

Abstract Multicasting multimedia streams in IEEE 802.11 wireless LANs has two issues: reliability and rate adaptation. We address these issues by proposing two mechanisms that augment the current multicasting standards in a backward-compatible fashion. Semi-reliable multicasting (SRM) selects a leader who sends feedback information to lessen the reliability problem of multicast frames. Probing-based auto-rate fallback (PARF) allows the multicast source to adjust the bit rate depending on the link conditions of multicast recipients. Comprehensive simulation experiments reveal that SRM + PARF achieves reliability and link efficiency close to those of an omniscient multicasting framework.