A media access and feedback protocol for reliable multicast over wireless channel

Abstract

A link level reliable multicast requires a channel access protocol to resolve the collision of feedback messages sent by multicast data receivers. In this paper, we propose a virtual token based channel access and feedback protocol (VTCAF), which can trade off between reliability and access delay. The protocol uses the virtual (implicit) token passing mechanism based on carrier sensing to avoid the collision of feedback messages. We have simulated our protocol using Castalia network simulator to evaluate the performance parameters. Simulation results show that our protocol is able to considerably reduce average access delay while ensuring very high reliability at the same time. © Springer-Verlag 2013.