A First Implementation and Evaluation of the IEEE 802.11aa Group Addressed Transmission Service

The IEEE 802.11aa Task Group has recently standardized a set of mechanisms to efficiently support video multicasting, namely, the Group Addressed Transmission Service (GATS). In this article, we report the implementation of these mechanisms over commodity hardware, which we make publicly available, and conduct a study to assess their performance under a variety of real-life scenarios. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first experimental assessment of GATS, which is performed along three axes: we report their complexity in terms of lines of code, their effectiveness when delivering video traffic, and their efficiency when utilizing wireless resources. Our results provide key insights on the resulting trade-offs when using each mechanism, and paves the way for new enhancements to deliver video over 802.11 Wireless LANs.