Evaluation of the IEEE 802.11aa group addressed service in VHT Wi-Fi networks

Multimedia content represents a significant portion of the traffic in computer networks, and COVID-19 has only made this portion bigger, as it now represents an even more significant part of the traffic. This overhead can, however, be reduced when many users access the same content. In this context, Wi-Fi, which is the most popular Radio Access Technology, introduced the Group Addressed Transmission Service (GATS) with the amendment IEEE 802.11aa. GATS defines a set of policies aiming to make multicast traffic more robust and efficient. However, Wi-Fi is constantly evolving, and as it improves and greater bandwidths and data rates become available, it is necessary to reevaluate the behavior of mechanisms introduced in past amendments. This is also the case with GATS, whose policies have different behaviors and adapt better to different channel conditions. These policies have been evaluated in the past on High Throughput networks. Still, none of the evaluations provided insights into the behavior of GATS policies in Very-High Throughput (VHT) physical layers in a realistic manner. This is extremely relevant as a greater available bandwidth can impact the decisions of the GATS policy configuration. Thus, in this work, we present an evaluation of the IEEE 802.11aa amendment with a VHT physical layer in a realistic scenario that uses Minstrel as a rate adaptation algorithm simulated in NS-3.