Journal of Zhejiang University SCIENCE A
ISSN 1673-565X(Print), 1862-1775(Online), Monthly

2009   Vol. 10   No. 6   p. 828~833

Enhanced power saving mechanism for supporting multicast services in 802.11 wireless LANs

Yong HE^†1, Rui-xi YUAN^†‡1, Xiao-jun MA², Jun LI²

(¹Center for Intelligent & Networked Systems, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China)
(²Thomson Broadband, R&D, Co., Ltd, Beijing 100085, China)
^‡ Corresponding Author
^†E-mail: heyong04@mails.tsinghua.edu.cn; ryuan@tsinghua.edu.cn
Received July 5, 2008; revision accepted Jan. 8, 2009; Crosschecked Apr. 29, 2009

Abstract: Traditional 802.11 power saving mechanism (PSM) treats multicast and broadcast traffic equally, and suffers significant performance degradation with multicast background traffic. This paper proposes an enhanced PSM that effectively differentiates multicast streams. It re-arranges the virtual bitmap of the traffic indication map (TIM) to carry traffic status for multicast groups and introduces a concept of sequential transmission of multi-addressed data to facilitate differentiation among multicast groups. Our analysis shows that the enhanced PSM can effectively save power in mixed traffic environments.

Key words: 802.11, Wireless network, Power saving, Multicast services
doi:10.1631/jzus.A0820514             CLC number: TN92

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