Performance evaluation of the IEEE 802.11aa multicast mechanisms for 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, cannot satisfy the amount of bandwidth that the video applications require. In order to cope with the increasing demand of multimedia traffic, the IEEE 802.11aa Task Group has recently standardized new mechanisms to allow efficient and robust transmission of multicast flows in Wireless LAN. However, the standard leaves open the choice of which one to use for a given scenario. In this paper, we explore the new mechanisms introduced by the 802.11aa Task Group, providing insights of the new choices for handling group addressed frames, by carrying out extensive simulations. Our results highlight the various trade-offs each mechanism has in terms of robustness, resource consumption and complexity, and provide a set of recommended guidelines for their use.