Expanding the use of CTS-to-Self mechanism for reliable broadcasting on IEEE 802.11 networks

Abstract

The growing need for multimedia applications within wireless Local Area Networks (LAN) demands reliable and efficient broadcasting and multicasting transmission of throughput sensitive data, like audio and video. IEEE 802.11 standard which is the primary technology in wireless LANs was not initially designed to handle heavy broadcasting traffic. However, this raises a series of reliability problems mainly related to the lack of an effective feedback mechanism for multicasting and broadcasting transmission. This inherited drawback does not allow the standard to take full advantage of the bandwidth offered by its latest amendments. The main aim of this work is to offer an alternative congestion control mechanism especially for broadcasting. For this, the expanding use of the CTS-to-Self protection mechanism is proposed. The Medium Access Control (MAC) algorithm is appropriately modified and tested under various data traffic conditions. The simulation shows that the use of this amended MAC method in conjunction with the suitable data packet size can significantly improve throughput, in multimedia type data broadcasting over wireless ad-hoc networks.