FRAS: Fair Rate Adaptation Scheme for Directional Multicast in 60 GHz Multi-Gigabit WLANs

Abstract

Although extensive studies have been carried out on the provision of multicast services in wireless local area networks (WLANs), most of them do not consider the use of directional antennas. In particular, rate adaptation and fairness issues among sectors in directional multicast are not well-studied topics. In this paper, a fair rate adaptation scheme (FRAS) that seeks to determine appropriate transmission rates that maintain fairness among sectors and accommodate as many multicast devices as possible is proposed. Extensive simulation results show that FRAS outperforms the equal-rate scheme in terms of the number of devices that receive multicast frames. Furthermore, FRAS can improve the fairness performance as compared with the heavy-sector first scheme.