Performance Evaluation of IEEE 802.11aa MAC Enhancements for Robust Audio Video Streaming

Video traffic is foreseen to account for the majority of the Internet traffic in the near future. While the demand of video transmission keeps growing, the vast majority of wireless equipment deployed in the home environment, based on IEEE 802.11, does not support robust multicast transmission that video applications require. In order to cope with the increasing demand of multimedia traffic, the IEEE 802.11aa Task Group is standardizing new mechanisms that allow the efficient transmission of unicast/multicast multimedia flows in Wireless LAN. In this thesis, we provide analytical models for the throughput of new mechanisms proposed by the Task Group and we validate them through simulation. We also study the reliability via simulation, providing insight into new methods included in the standard to handle group addressed frames.