Study of the group-based approach to disseminate control information in wireless networks

Various networking protocols disseminate much control information. An important task is to reduce the amount of such information in order to free channel resources for user data. In the paper, we study a novel group-based approach for dissemination of control information introduced in the latest version of the IEEE 802.11 standard. The key idea of this approach is to join various pieces of information into a small number of groups and send differential updates related only to those groups which content is changed. However, the group management algorithm (GMA) which directly affects the performance of such an approach is not specified. We consider a simple GMA, develop an analytical model to estimate the amount of sent control information, and show that this amount is significantly less than for the classical full dump approach.