On the Impact of Mobility on Multicast Capacity of Wireless Networks

Analogous to the beneficial impact that 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 the throughput for multicast networks. This paper considers an all-mobile multicast network, and characterizes its multicast capacity scaling. The scaling result shows that the growth-rate of the throughput in the all-mobile multicast network is order-wise higher compared to the all-static multicast network. Further, the paper considers a static-mobile hybrid multicast network, and establishes that, if there are sufficient number of mobile nodes (that is order-wise smaller than the total number of nodes) in the network, then mobile nodes can enhance the order behavior of the multicast throughput.