Flexible and Modular Support for Multicast Rate Adaptation in WLANs

The flexibility and virtualization capabilities provided by wireless cards have received significant attention as a means to reduce development costs. In this paper we present a modular architecture that exploits the features provided by emerging PHY and MAC implementations to rapidly develop new rate adaptation algorithms for multicast trans- mission in wireless LANs. We validate our solution by developing three rate adapta- tion algorithms that use an innovative sensing mechanism to evaluate the frame recep- tion correlation of the members of the multicast group. The experimental results obtained on a real-life testbed show that our solutions permit to increase the performance of multicas…