Efficient Multicast Association to Improve the Throughput in IEEE 802.11 WLAN

This paper deals with the problem of optimal association of stations (S T A s) to access points (A P s) for mulicast services in IEEE 802.11 WLAN. In a multicast session, all the subscribed S T A s receive the multicast data packet at the same data rate (R _{m i n} ) from their respective serving A P s. A higher value of R _{m i n} improves the multicast throughput by completing the ongoing multicast session in lesser time. This also improves the unicast throughput as the cycle duration is shared by the unicast and multicast sessions. To provide multicast services to the S T A s, we need to select a minimum cardinality subset of A P s as the system message overhead depends on this cardinality. However, such a minimum cardinality subset of A P s may not be possible to activate simultaneously due to the limited number of available orthogonal frequency channels. In this paper, we develop a combined greedy algorithm that selects a subset of A P s with minimum cardinality for which a conflict-free frequency assignment exists and finds an association between the S T A s and the selected A P s that maximizes the R _{m i n} value. Through simulation we have shown that the proposed algorithm selects significantly less number of A P s for different R _{m i n} values in comparison to the well-known metrics for multicast association like RSSI, minimum hop-distance, normalized-cost and in-range STA number.