Analysis of mobile multicasting in IP-based wireless cellular networks

As the wireless Internet is burgeoning with a variety of multicast based applications (e.g. teleconferencing, live video and stock quote broadcasts), a cost analysis of multicasting in wireless networks is needed to help service providers in their cost-benefit tradeoff. This paper presents such an analysis in IP-based cellular networks, considering user mobility which directly affects the multicast group size and indirectly affects the cost of the multicast delivery tree. Our analytical results show that the expected multicast group size increases linearly with the number of network nodes. Moreover, the expected number of nodes added/deleted from the multicast tree increases with the number of network nodes, but saturates with time. For an increased number of receivers, the estimated cost of multicast delivery tree in a cellular network is found to be less than that in a static MBone network.