Impact of device unavailability on the reliability of multicast transport in IEEE 802.11 networks

Multicast transport is an efficient solution to deliver the same content simultaneously to many receivers. This transport mode is mainly used these days to deliver real-time video streams. However, multicast transmissions support over IEEE 802.11 networks does not provide any feedback policies, which implies a definite loss of missing packets. This impacts the reliability of the multicast transport and the application employing it. An alternative to improve the reliability of multicast streaming over 802.11 networks is to prevent packet losses. In this perspective, it is necessary to identify the loss causes and to perform the required prevention actions. It is well known that collisions and path loss are two fundamental sources of transmission failures. Their impact can be eliminated by means of collision prevention and data rate adaptation. However, several works show that the loss rate of multicast packets may be considerable even in collisions-free environments and using an appropriate transmission rate. Particularly they show that losses may have a bursty nature which does not correspond to the bit error rate model of the PHY layer as defined by the chipset manufacturers. Therefore, in this paper, we carry out a thorough investigation of the loss causes in wireless networks. We show that device unavailability may be the principal cause of the significant packet losses that occur and their bursty nature. Particularly, our results show that the CPU overload may incur a loss rate of 100%, and that the delivery ratio may be limited to 35% when the device is in the power save mode.