OFDMA-Based Reliable Multicast MAC Protocol for Wireless Ad-Hoc Networks

Abstract

Compared with unicast, multicast over wireless ad-hoc networks do not support reliability due to their inability to exchange request-to-send/clear-to-send (RTS/CTS) and ACK packets with multiple recipients. Although several media access control (MAC) layer protocols have been proposed to provide reliable multicast, these introduce additional overhead, which degrades system performance. A novel MAC protocol for reliable wireless multicast is proposed in this paper. By adapting orthogonal frequency division multiple access characteristics in CTS and ACK packets, the protocol achieves reliability over wireless multicast with minimized overhead.