Multicast Strategies for Robots Moving within the Coverage of A WLAN

The are many advantages of Infrastructure based wireless local area networks (WLAN) for industrial applications because they allow mobile entities and a priori fixed supervisor entities to communicate. If mobiles are to cooperate they have to share common information thanks to multicast protocols. The standard mechanisms are not performed in a short enough time to allow efficient cooperation. This paper addresses the need for a fast multicast mechanism dedicated to mobiles moving within a same WLAN. This mechanism makes the access points (AP) play the part of a mirror and of an exchange master. Its performances are evaluated thanks to network simulator (NS2) in function of the number of cooperating mobiles moving within the same cell.