Performance Evaluation of Reliable Multicast Strategies in 802.11 Networks

802.11 networks have many differences comparing with wired Ethernet-based networks. Many group communication systems, which provide both reliable and ordered multicast, have been designed and optimized primarily for Ethernet-based networks. We would like to study the performance of these systems in 802.11 networks to see which strategy works best in this new environment. Furthermore, there exist many different strategies to achieve reliable multicast only. We are also interested in studying how different strategies perform over 802.11 networks. In particular, group communication systems that provide both reliable and ordered multicast are believed to incur higher overhead with respect to the reliable but non-ordered counterpart. Our preliminary results show that it may not be the case because some group communication protocol automatically reinforces medium access as a by-product of its total ordering strategy, and consequently, exhibit superior performance under heavy load.