Multicast Scaling Properties in Massively Dense Ad Hoc Networks

We study the benefits of multicast routing in the performance of mobile ad hoc networks. In particular we show that if a node wishes to communicate with n distinct destinations, multicast can reduce the overall network load by a factor O (radicn), when used instead of unicast. One of the implications of this scaling property consists in a significant increase of the total capacity of the network for data delivery. We discuss how these results can be taken into consideration in the operation of a multicast protocol using overlay multicast trees