A new reliable multicast scheme for multimedia applications in wireless environment

With the constant development of multimedia technologies and mobile devices, the demand of transmitting multimedia streams to mobile devices will be one of the major applications in wireless networks. However, IEEE 802.11 does not support reliable multicast due to its inability to exchange ACKs with multiple recipients and the influence of signal interference, congestion and hidden terminal problems. It is not suitable for the real-time multimedia transmission in this environment. In this paper, we propose a new reliable multicast scheme to solve the above problems by using a three-layer scheme. Our simulation results show that the performance of the wireless network with this proposed reliable scheme is much better than the original 802.11 protocol. The loss rate of the packets transmitted in this reliable 802.11 environment decreased a lot and the throughput of this reliable wireless environment performed constantly well compared with the original 802.11 protocol for mobile nodes.