Performance and scalability evaluation of IEEE 802.11v/aa multicast transport

IEEE 802.11v and 802.11aa are two recent amendments that define new functionalities in order to support a reliable multicast transport over wireless networks. The first amendment introduces directed multicast service (DMS). On the other hand, 802.11aa defines the groupcast with retries (GCR) service, which proposes two retransmission policies: block acknowledgement (GCR-BACK) and unsolicited retry (GCR-UR). In this paper, we evaluate the throughput and the scalability of these new proposals using both analytical and simulation approaches. We show that DMS has the lowest scalability, while GCR-BACK is not appropriate for groups with a large number of receivers. We conclude that GCR-UR is the most appropriate for large groups. However, increasing the number of transmission retries reduces significantly the achieved throughput of the unsolicited retry policy. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.