A distributed cooperative multicast scheduling strategy in IEEE 802.11 networks

In wireless multicast, some users may fail to receive data as a result of bad channel conditions. The throughput of traditional multicast strategy is constrained by the node with the worst channel condition. In this paper, we propose a distributed cooperative multicast scheduling strategy, in which, every user which has successfully received data can decide whether to retransmit data by sensing MNACK packets. The proposed scheme can achieve good throughput by exploiting multi-channel diversity across multiple users’ cooperation. In addition, the constraint of power consumption is also considered. Simulation results show that our scheme can provide good throughput and fairness performance with the constraint of average system power consumption.