A novel multicasting scheme over wireless LAN systems by using relay

Abstract

We propose a novel multicast scheme that can provide quality-of-service (QoS) to multicast service over IEEE 802.11 wireless LANs by utilizing medium access control (MAC) layer relay. It is well known that IEEE 802.11 provides a physical layer multi-rate capability in response to different channel conditions, and hence packets may be delivered at a higher data rate through a relay node than through the direct link if the direct link has low quality and low data rate. We develop the distributed relay node selection algorithm and the relay channel selection algorithm. The effectiveness of proposed scheme is examined by numerical method and simulation. Simulations show that the proposed relayed multicast significantly improves throughput and delay performance. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2006.