skip to main content
research-article

A first implementation and evaluation of the IEEE 802.11aa group addressed transmission service

Published: 31 December 2013 Publication History

Abstract

The IEEE 802.11aa Task Group has recently standardized a set of mechanisms to efficiently support video multicasting, namely, the Group Addressed Transmission Service (GATS). In this article, we report the implementation of these mechanisms over commodity hardware, which we make publicly available, and conduct a study to assess their performance under a variety of real-life scenarios. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first experimental assessment of GATS, which is performed along three axes: we report their complexity in terms of lines of code, their effectiveness when delivering video traffic, and their efficiency when utilizing wireless resources. Our results provide key insights on the resulting trade-offs when using each mechanism, and paves the way for new enhancements to deliver video over 802.11 Wireless LANs.

References

[1]
Part 11: Wireless LAN Medium Access Control (MAC) and Physical Layer (PHY) Specifications - Amendment 3: MAC Enhancements for Robust Audio Video Streaming, IEEE Amendment 802.11aa, 2012.
[2]
J. Vella and S. Zammit, "A Survey of Multicasting over Wireless Access Networks," IEEE Commu. Surveys Tutorials, no. 99, pp. 1--36, 2012.
[3]
J. Kuri and S. K. Kasera, "Reliable Multicast in Multi-Access Wireless LANs," Wireless Networks, vol. 7, no. 4, pp. 359--369, 2001.
[4]
S. Gupta, V. Shankar, and S. Lalwani, "Reliable Multicast MAC Protocol for Wireless LANs," in IEEE ICC, vol. 1, May 2003, pp. 93--97.
[5]
J. Miroll, Z. Li, and T. Herfet, "Wireless Feedback Cancellation for Leader-Based MAC Layer Multicast Protocols," in IEEE ISCE, June 2010, pp. 1--6.
[6]
M. Santos, J. Villalon, and L. Orozco-Barbosa, "Evaluation of the IEEE 802.11aa Group Addressed Service for Robust Audio-Video Streaming," in IEEE ICC, June 2012, pp. 6879--6884.
[7]
B. Han, A. Schulman, F. Gringoli, N. Spring, B. Bhattacharjee, L. Nava, L. Ji, S. Lee, and R. Miller, "Maranello: Practical Partial Packet Recovery for 802.11," in Proc. of the 7th NSDI, 2010.
[8]
P. Salvador, F. Gringoli, V. Mancuso, P. Serrano, A. Mannocci, and A. Banchs, "VoIPiggy: Implementation and evaluation of a mechanism to boost voice capacity in 802.11 WLANs," in IEEE INFOCOM, March 2012, pp. 2931--2935.
[9]
S. Paris, N. Facchi, F. Gringoli, and A. Capone, "An Innovative Rate Adaptation Algorithm for Multicast Transmissions in Wireless LANs," in IEEE VTC-Spring, Dresden, Germany, 2-5 June 2013.

Cited By

View all

Index Terms

  1. A first implementation and evaluation of the IEEE 802.11aa group addressed transmission service

        Recommendations

        Reviews

        Karl Andersson

        The amendment IEEE 802.11aa was standardized in order to better support video multicast over Wi-Fi, or more precisely, to support real-time streaming of video from a single producer to multiple receiving clients on the same wireless local area network (LAN). This is referred to as group addressed transmission service (GATS). In particular, a very interesting medium access control (MAC) scheme is designed, so that the transmitter sends a burst of video frame packets to a group address, and then performs a per-station poll to receive acknowledgments of successfully received frames. That MAC scheme is more complex than others because a sliding window of frames has to be maintained by the transmitter and ack handling has to be done. On the other hand, that MAC scheme utilizes the wireless medium more efficiently. The contribution of this paper is twofold: the implementation, which is made publicly available, and the evaluation of the different multicast schemes direct multicast service (DMS), unsolicited retries (UR), and block acknowledgment (BA). The results are summarized in a table showing that BA has higher complexity on the one hand, but also higher effectiveness and efficiency on the other hand, outperforming DMS and UR. Researchers and innovators in the field of wireless communications, as well as implementers of IEEE 802.11 functionality should find the article worthwhile reading. Online Computing Reviews Service

        Access critical reviews of Computing literature here

        Become a reviewer for Computing Reviews.

        Comments

        Information & Contributors

        Information

        Published In

        cover image ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review
        ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review  Volume 44, Issue 1
        January 2014
        61 pages
        ISSN:0146-4833
        DOI:10.1145/2567561
        Issue’s Table of Contents
        Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

        Publisher

        Association for Computing Machinery

        New York, NY, United States

        Publication History

        Published: 31 December 2013
        Published in SIGCOMM-CCR Volume 44, Issue 1

        Check for updates

        Author Tags

        1. 802.11aa
        2. WLAN
        3. groupcast
        4. standard

        Qualifiers

        • Research-article

        Contributors

        Other Metrics

        Bibliometrics & Citations

        Bibliometrics

        Article Metrics

        • Downloads (Last 12 months)1
        • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0
        Reflects downloads up to 24 Dec 2024

        Other Metrics

        Citations

        Cited By

        View all

        View Options

        Login options

        View options

        PDF

        View or Download as a PDF file.

        PDF

        eReader

        View online with eReader.

        eReader

        Media

        Figures

        Other

        Tables

        Share

        Share

        Share this Publication link

        Share on social media