A Survey of Power Saving Protocols for Multicast Services in 802.11 WLANs

In the primordial years we use LAN cable for transferring data from one source to another source. But we are unable to connect more then one system. Later on that we had HUB for connecting more then one system, But HUB is a collusion domain many data’s will gets lost due to that. After that we had MAC (Medium Access Control) protocol which is more comfortable when compare to HUB. The most widely used technology for medium access in wireless local area networks, multihop mesh and ad-hoc networks are the IEEE 802.11 standard MAC protocol. Some key challenges that 802.11 protocols solves are collision and hidden terminal and the PHY layer design in 802.11n has the provision to improve the performance in multipath fading scenarios using multiple input multiple output. In this IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol we can communicate only as unicast, by implementing the SMAC (Selected Medium Access Control) Protocol we try to develop the Multicast communication. In SMAC we have the power saving, various frequencies range to communicate. This paper is a comparative study of the MAC protocols and trying to implement the unicast to multicast communication.