A multirate MAC protocol for reliable multicast in multihop wireless networks

Many multicast applications, such as audio/video streaming, file sharing or emergency reporting, are becoming quite common in wireless mobile environment, through the widespread deployment of 802.11-based wireless networks. However, despite the growing interest in the above applications, the current IEEE 802.11 standard does not offer any medium access control (MAC) layer support to the efficient and reliable provision of multicast services. It does not provide any MAC-layer recovery mechanism for unsuccessful multicast transmissions. Consequently, lost frames cannot be detected, hence retransmitted, causing a significant quality of service degradation. In addition, 802.11 multicast traffic is sent at the basic data rate, often resulting in severe throughput reduction. In this work, we address these issues by presenting a reliable multicast MAC protocol for wireless multihop networks, which is coupled with a lightweight rate adaptation scheme. Simulation results show that our schemes provide high packet delivery ratio and, when compared with other state-of-the-art solutions, they also provide reduced control overhead and data delivery delay.