Multicast Capacity in MANET with Infrastructure Support

We study the multicast capacity under a network model featuring both node´s mobility and infrastructure support. Combinations between mobility and infrastructure, as well as multicast transmission and infrastructure, have already showed effective ways to increase multicast capacity. In this work, we jointly consider the impact of the above three factors on network capacity. We assume that m static base stations and n mobile users are placed in an ad hoc network. A general mobility model is adopted, such that each user moves within a bounded distance from its home-point with an arbitrary pattern. In addition, each mobile node serves as a source of multicast transmission, which results in a total number of n multicast transmissions. We focus on the situations in which base stations actually benefit the capacity improvement, and find that multicast capacity in a mobile hybrid network falls into several regimes. For each regime, reachable upper and lower bounds are derived. Our work contains theoretical analysis of multicast capacity in hybrid networks and provides guidelines for the design of real hybrid systems combing cellular and ad hoc networks.