AMuSe: Adaptive Multicast Services to Very Large Groups - Project Overview and Lessons Learned

WiFi multicast to very large groups gained attention as a solution for multimedia delivery in crowded areas. Yet, most recently proposed approaches do not provide performance guarantees. In this paper, we describe the AMuSe system, whose objective is to enable scalable and adaptive WiFi multicast services. AMuSe includes a light-weight feedback mechanism that allows to WiFi Access Point to monitor the channel quality of the users. This feedback allows to dynamically adapt the multicast transmission at the AP such as optimizing the multicast transmission rate. We implemented AMuSe on the ORBIT testbed and evaluated its performance in large groups with approximately 200 WiFi devices in different scenarios. We show that AMuSe supports high throughput multicast flows to hundreds of receivers while meeting quality requirements and that it outperforms other systems. Moreover, it can support multiple high quality video streams where over 90% of the nodes receive video quality that is excellent or very good.