Abstract
The multicast communication concept offers a scalable and efficient method for many classes of applications; however, its potential remains largely unexploited when it comes to link-layer multicasting in wireless local area networks. The fundamental lacking feature for this is a transmission rate control mechanism that offers higher transmission performance and lower channel utilization, while ensuring the reliability of wireless multicast transmissions. This is much harder to achieve in a scalable manner for multicast when compared with unicast transmissions, which employs explicit acknowledgment mechanisms for rate control. This article introduces EWRiM, a reliable multicast transmission rate control protocol for IEEE 802.11 networks. It adapts the transmission rate sampling concept to multicast through an aggregated receiver feedback scheme and combines it with a sliding window forward error correction (FEC) mechanism for ensuring reliability at the link layer. An inherent novelty of EWRiM is the close interaction of its FEC and transmission rate selection components to address the performance-reliability tradeoff in multicast communications. The performance of EWRiM was tested in three scenarios with intrinsically different traffic patterns; namely, music streaming scenario, large data frame delivery scenario, and an IoT scenario with frequent distribution of small data packets. Evaluation results demonstrate that the proposed approach adapts well to all of these realistic multicast traffic scenarios and provides significant improvements over the legacy multicast- and unicast-based transmissions.
Highlights
Multicast in IP networks is a well-established concept, but it still plays only a marginal role within local networks, being mainly used for support functions
An inherent novelty of Enhanced Rate Control for Wireless Reliable Multicast (EWRiM) is the close interaction of its forward error correction (FEC) and transmission rate selection components to address the performance-reliability tradeoff in multicast communications
We use the corresponding packet loss ratio (PLR) since it allows a more intuitive visualization for small loss rates, which the rate control aims at. This packet delivery ratio (PDR), resp., PLR, has to be differentiated from the PDR used within the rate control as described in Section 3.3, which is calculated on the MAC frames below the intermediate FEC layer
Summary
Multicast in IP networks is a well-established concept, but it still plays only a marginal role within local networks, being mainly used for support functions (like network management and service discovery). New types of applications with group-based communication models are growing, for example, in the domain of Internet of Things (IoT), which triggers new impulses on multicast. Examples for this development are multicast-enabled versions of CoAP [1] and MQTT [2]. We present an approach aiming at enabling the full potential of the multicast concept for 802.11 networks, which could significantly improve the efficiency and performance. The protocol proposed in this article, Enhanced Rate Control for Wireless Reliable Multicast (EWRiM), is aimed at general multicast network applications and is not limited to specific use cases like multimedia content distribution.
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