Wireless Stealth Multicast: Bandwidth Conservation for Last-Mile Wireless Clients

Rich multimedia places tremendous demands on wireless networks. Thus, it is important to use the limited bandwidth available to wireless networks as efficiently as possible. One method for efficient transfer of redundant data is multicast. Unfortunately, the use of multicast is limited due to the requirement for global deployment. Additionally, heterogeneous client speeds can further complicate the use of multicast in addition to limiting its effectiveness. In this paper, we present a novel approach, wireless stealth multicast, which dynamically creates virtual multicast groups from redundant network traffic in order to conserve bandwidth. The dynamic conversion into virtual multicast groups allows for simple deployment by avoiding the global support requirements of traditional multicast. Additionally, an analytical analysis of the effectiveness of wireless stealth multicast in a speed heterogeneous network and the potential for significant power savings is shown. With the use of experimental studies it is shown that wireless stealth multicast reduces the bandwidth consumed in the network, while improving QoS in terms of end-to-end delay and packet loss.