A collision avoidance scheme for the synchronized broadcast packets in a multi-AP Wi-Fi broadcasting system

Abstract

A Wi-Fi broadcasting system is a kind of Mobile-TV system that transmits multimedia content over Wi-Fi networks. The specialty of the system is that it takes advantage of broadcast packets for streaming to be scalable to the number of users. However, the loss rate of broadcast packets is much higher than that of unicast ones because MAC layer retransmission is not applied on broadcast packets. To recover lost packets, a packet level Forward Error Correction (FEC) scheme is usually used in Wi-Fi broadcasting systems. But it introduces additional transmission overhead, which is usually proportional to the packet loss rate. So it is important to reduce the packet loss rate to build an efficient and reliable Wi-Fi broadcasting system. While past studies have considered only single-AP systems, our study focuses on a multi-AP system which is designed to cover a much larger area. We found a specific packet collision problem that increases packet loss rate significantly in a multi-AP system. It is caused by the simultaneous arrival and transmission of a broadcast packet at and by APs. We identify two scenarios of the collision that depend on the channel state at the time of packet arrival. We propose two collision avoidance methods to handle these scenarios: Broadcast Packet Scheduling Method (BPSM) and Adaptive Contention Window-Sizing Method(ACWSM). We implement both methods in our multi-AP Wi-Fi broadcasting system and verify their effectiveness through experiments.