Harnessing Beamforming Capabilities for Link Layer Multicast
Abstract
Wireless multicast is an important service primitive for emerging applications such as live video, streaming audio and content telecasts. Transmission rate in such a link layer multicast is bottlenecked by the rate of the weakest client, leading to channel under-utilization. Attempts to increase the data rate results in lower reliability (due to higher bit error rate) and higher unfairness. This poster utilizes smart beamforming antennas to improve multicast performance in wireless LANs. The main idea is to satisfy majority of the (strong) clients with a high-rate omnidirectional transmission, followed by high-rate directional transmission(s) to cover the weaker ones. By selecting an optimal transmission strategy, we show that the multicast throughput can be maximized while achieving a desired delivery ratio at all the clients. We use testbed measurements to verify our main assumptions. We simulate our protocol in Qualnet, and observe consistent performance improvements over a wide range of client topologies and time-varying channel conditions.