Distributed Medium Access Control for N-Screen Multicast Services in Home Networks

N-screen is an emerging technology to support multimedia multicasting, content sharing and content mobility. N-screen service providers should obtain the technology that provides the highest quality content seamlessly. Distributed nature of WiMedia distributed-MAC protocol can provide full mobility support, and achieves seamless medium access method in contrast to IEEE 802.15.3. So, in this paper, WiMedia distributed-MAC protocol is adopted and an asynchronous multicast transmission (AMT) technology is proposed to enhance performance of seamless N-screen wireless service based on distributed-MAC. The ACK frame transmissions are not required for multicast transmissions. By using this property in AMT, if a device is a multicast receiver, its reserved time slots can be reserved by the other devices with 1-hop distance. Furthermore, each N-screen device broadcasts and shares the information including an order in asynchronous traffic reservations to reduce conflicts in determining the transmission order of asynchronous N-screen packets. Therefore, AMT scheme expands the number of time slots available and throughputs for multicast and asynchronous traffic reservations when comparing with the distributed-MAC standard system. N-screen communications based on distributed-MAC with the proposed AMT shows a new framework for realizing N-screen wireless service with the full content mobility.