A LEADER BASED PRIORITY RING RELIABLE MULTICAST IN WLANs

Reliable multicast is difficult to achieve in CSMA/CA networks when multiple multicast and unicast senders compete for the medium. We propose a leader based priority ring multicast protocol (LPRMP) to increase reliability in wireless LANs. The algorithm is specifically tailored to accommodate a large number of legacy stations in multiple overlapping cells since the LPRMP solution only requires extensions in the Access Point (AP). An AP implementing LPRMP will be scheduled to send multicast packets after waiting a unique multicast collision detection interval (MCDI), and sending a RTS to reserve the channel. We reduce the occurrence of collisions among multicast packets and unicast packets. A simulation verifies that our protocol improves the performance of multicast communication in WLANs.