Beacon-driven Leader Based Protocol over a GE Channel for MAC Layer Multicast Error Control

In wireless networks current standard MAC layer protocols don’t provide any error correction scheme for broadcast/multicast. In this paper, we enhance a Leader Based Protocol (LBP) and propose a Beacon-driven Leader Based Protocol (BLBP) for the MAC layer multicast error control. To guarantee a very low Packet Loss Ratio (PLR) under strict delay constraints for video multicast over a Gilbert-Elliott (GE) channel, we analyze BLBP and compare it with LBP and different application layer multicast error control schemes via simulation experiments. Both the theoretical analysis and simulation results show that BLBP can correct nearly all the errors for all receivers in the MAC layer and is more efficient than LBP. BLBP is also more efficient than the application layer Automatic Repeat request (ARQ) scheme and the total multicast delay is much shorter. BLBP is very good for real-time multicast applications with strict delay constraints.