Scalable WiFi Multicast Services for Very Large Groups

In recent years IEEE 802.11-based wireless local area network (WLAN) technology, referred to as WiFi, has been rapidly deployed all over the world. The vast majority of today's mobile devices are WiFi enabled, including laptops, PDAs and smart-phones. WiFi has been proposed by both academia and industry for multimedia content distribution. However, its lack of adequate support for multicast services hinders its ability to provide multimedia content distribution to a large number of mobile devices. We propose a simple and efficient interference mitigation solution for multicast services over WiFi that overcomes major problems with current solutions. Specifically, we offer the reduction of the number of lost multicast packets to a very low level as well as efficient utilization of network resources. Unlike other proposed solutions, our proposal does not require any changes to the standards nor does it require any modification to mobile devices.