Impact of Mobility on Multicast Capacity of Wireless Networks

Analogous to the beneficial impact that (limited) mobility has on the throughput of unicast networks, this paper establishes that mobility can provide a similar gain in the order-wise growth-rate of throughput for multicast networks. This paper considers a hybrid network scenario, with (n) static nodes and (n ) mobile nodes, where each multicast source in the network has (n1- ) destinations associated with it. The paper shows that, if there are sufficient number of mobile nodes in the network (i.e. is greater than a threshold), then mobile nodes can enhance the order behavior of network throughput with number of nodes n. The paper analyzes a staticmobile hybrid multicast network for an unrestricted (uniform) mobility model and an all-mobile multicast network for a class of restricted mobility models. It is shown that, even when mobility is limited geographically or to some nodes in the network, it can impact the scaling law of throughput in the network.