WiFi Multicast to Very Large Groups - Experimentation on the ORBIT Testbed

While WiFi has been proposed for multimedia content distribution, its lack of adequate support for multicast services hinders its ability to provide multimedia content distribution to a large number of devices. In our recent papers we proposed AMuSe, a scalable and adaptive system for WiFi multicast which is based on accurate receiver feedback and that incurs a small control overhead. Specifically, the system includes a scheme for dynamic selection of a subset of the multicast receivers as feedback nodes, which periodically send information, such as channel quality or received packet statistics, to the multicast sender. We implemented the AMuSe system in the ORBIT testbed and evaluated its performance in large groups with 150-200 receivers. We present a dynamic web-based application that demonstrates the operation of the system based on actual traces collected on the testbed in several experiments. It demonstrates the operation of AMuSe in various setting and environments.