Multi-Stage Multicast in IEEE 802.11 Wireless Networks

In IEEE 802.11 WLANs, the basic (lowest) data rate is used for multicast to provide satisfactory performance to low quality users. However, this approach can reduce the overall network throughput. In this work, we propose multi-stage multicast (MSM) schemes where multicast frames are transmitted redundantly via higher data rates. Due to the redundant transmission, comparable reliability to the conventional multicast scheme is obtained while the throughput can be significantly improved. We also extend the MSM scheme for bursty wireless channel errors by integrating network coding, i.e., MSM-network coding (MSM-NC). From numerical results, it can be shown that the MSM and MSM-NC schemes achieve higher throughput and comparable reliability.