Multicast Capacity, Delay and Delay Jitter in Intermittently Connected Mobile Networks

Many important real networks can be modeled as intermittently connected mobile networks (ICMNs), like the vehicular ad hoc networks, wildlife tracking and habitat monitoring sensor networks, military networks, etc. However, the fundamental performance limits of ICMNs are still largely unknown so far. This paper explores the capability of these networks to support multicast traffic, where each source node desires to send packets to k distinct destinations and all nodes move according to the generalized hybrid random walk mobility model. We show how the network capacity and related delay/delay jitter for supporting multicast in such ICMNs are scaling with the basic network parameters under three transmission protocols: one-hop relay, two-hop relay without packet redundancy and two-hop relay with packet redundancy.