Heterogeneity increases multicast capacity in clustered network

In this paper, we investigate the multicast capacity for static network with heterogeneous clusters. We study the effect of heterogeneities on the achievable capacity from two aspects, including heterogeneous cluster traffic (HCT) and heterogeneous cluster size (HCS). HCT means cluster clients are more likely to appear near the cluster head, instead of being uniformly distributed across the network and HCS means each cluster is also not equal in size as most prior literatures assume. Both of these two properties are commonly found in realistic networks. For this class of networks, we find that HCT increases network capacity for all the clusters and HCS does not influence the network capacity. Our work can generalize various results obtained under non-heterogeneous networks in the literature.