Multicast Capacity With Max-Min Fairness for Heterogeneous Networks

In this paper, we investigate the multicast capacity for static ad hoc networks with heterogeneous clusters. We study the effect of heterogeneous cluster traffic (HCT) on the achievable capacity. HCT means cluster clients are more likely to appear near the cluster head instead of being uniformly distributed across the network. Such a property is commonly found in real networks. By adopting max-min fairness, the minimum among all individual multicast capacities of clusters can be maximized. Since this minimal individual multicast capacity will not be maximized unlimitedly, our work focuses on deriving the upper bound of the minimum individual multicast capacity (we refer it as minimum capacity for simplicity) in HCT, which provides the best performance for the minimum multicast capacity to attain in the whole network. We find that HCT increases minimum capacity for ad hoc networks. Furthermore, the multicast capacity achieving scheme is provided to justify the derived asymptotic upper bound for the minimum capacity. Our work can generalize various results obtained under nonheterogeneous networks in previous literature.