LEADER-DRIVEN MULTICAST FOR VIDEO STREAMING ON WIRELESS LANS
Peng Ge, Philip K. McKinley · Networks · 2002
The IEEE 802.11 MAC layer uses RTS/CTS/ACK signaling to improve the reliability of unicast transmissions, but in current products there is no special signaling support for multicast transmissions. Therefore, the packet loss rate of multicast communication is generally higher than that of unicast communication. This paper evaluates a new MAC-layer multicasting technique called Leader-Driven Multicast (LDM). Instead of multicasting to a group address, the source node sends a unicast stream to the address of a leader node among the receivers. All other receivers passively receive this unicast stream, including retransmissions. This paper investigates the effects of the LDM protocol on interactive video multicasting across WLANs. Results are presented from a simulation study using different packet loss models and different loss correlations among receivers. The results indicate that LDM is potentially beneficial even when there is no loss correlation among receivers. When losses do exhibit some positive correlation LDM can provide a very high quality multicast stream to WLAN nodes, especially when combined with application-level error control techniques.