Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

4-2011

Abstract

Wireless multicast applications, such as MobiTV, web telecast, and multimedia classrooms, are gaining rapid popularity. The broadcast nature of the wireless channel is amenable to such multicasts because a single packet transmission can be received by all clients. Unfortunately, the rate of this transmission is bottlenecked by data rate of the weakest client, degrading system performance. Attempts to increase the data rate results in lower reliability and higher unfairness. This paper presents PeerCast, a wireless multicast protocol that engages clients in cooperative relaying. The main idea is simple. Instead of multicasting at the bottleneck rate, the access point transmits at a high rate and suitably chooses a few stronger clients to relay the packet to the weaker ones. Multiple transmissions of the same packet, each at higher rate, can achieve better throughput than one transmission at the low, bottleneck rate. We propose a new simultaneous reply-back scheme for clients and detect the power level to estimate the AP's transmission strategy. PeerCast translates these ideas into a functional system using off-the-shelf hardware. Performance evaluation on a 9 node testbed demonstrates consistent throughput and reliability improvements over 802.11. Simulations in QualNet indicate similar trends in large-scale networks.

Keywords

Multicast protocols, Radiocommunication, MobiTV, PeerCast, Access point, Cooperative relaying, Link layer multicast, Multimedia classrooms, Single packet transmission, Web telecast, Wireless channel, Wireless multicast application, Wireless multicast protocol

Discipline

Computer Sciences | Software Engineering

Research Areas

Software and Cyber-Physical Systems

Publication

Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM 2011: Shanghai, China: 10-15 April 2011

First Page

2939

Last Page

2947

ISBN

9781424499199

Identifier

10.1109/INFCOM.2011.5935134

Publisher

IEEE

City or Country

Piscataway, NJ

Additional URL

http://doi.org/10.1109/INFCOM.2011.5935134

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