A Survey of Multicasting over Wireless Access Networks

In this paper a survey of the research effort invested in the analysis of multicasting over wireless access networks from the late nineties onwards is presented. The analysis is dedicated although not limited to video multicasting both of live events and pre-stored video streaming. This investigation was not limited to a particular access network but focused on infrastructure topologies, including ad-hoc networks only when the latter was used to aid the former, which is a method frequently used in cooperative networking. We were interested in proposals aiming to decrease the packet error rate, in order to overcome the bursty error-prone wireless medium, since multicasting cannot simply receive feedback from the users as these will reply simultaneously causing a collision at the source. Hence, in this survey a review is presented showing how researchers proposed to solve this constraint using both modified unicast data transmission and also error correction techniques at various levels of the network protocol stack. However, a survey of multicasting over IEEE 802.16 and 3G radio access networks shows that reliability and resilience was not the only interest in which researchers have shown. There was in fact significant work dedicated to resource allocation as shall also be presented hereafter.