In recent years, wireless local area networks (LANs) as typified by IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) 802.11 have been widespread. In addition, along with the widespread use of wireless LANs, products supporting the wireless LANs have been increasing.
On the other hand, techniques for efficiently communicating with a plurality of communication devices have been developed. As such a technique, for example, a multicast scheme of transmitting frames to one or more communication devices at a time is known.
Here, there are cases in which, in order to improve reliability of communication, it is desirable to perform a transmission acknowledgment for frames (hereinafter also referred to as “acknowledgment (ACK)”) for multicast frames, similarly to unicast frames. As such transmission acknowledgment, a Block ACK (BA) for transmission acknowledgment for a plurality of frames is known.
For example, the invention related to a wireless communication device that performs transmission of a Block Ack Request (BAR) frame indicating a transmission request for a BA frame and reception of a BA frame serving as a response to the BAR frame for each terminal in order of time after a multicast frame is transmitted to each terminal is disclosed in Patent Literature 1.