A Group-aware Multicast Scheme in 60GHz WLANs

Abstract

The relation of multicast transmission and directional antennas is an open problem that has been debated for a long period of time. In this paper, we propose a group-aware multicast scheme of efficient multicast communication using the directional antennas for 60GHz millimeter wave wireless networks. For this purpose, we first derive the relation among beamwidth, distance between devices and most suitable data rate in the 60GHz frequency-based wireless network. In addition, for the dynamic beamforming of multicast communication, the x and y coordinates of any point with sender device at the center is generated, and a best-chosen group is deduced based on the Euclidean distance. Then the most suitable data rate for the group is obtained using the law of cosine. Using the Standard IEEE 802.11ad MAC protocol as an example, extensive simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme outperforms the existing multicast communication schemes with directional antennas under different situations.