An Analysis of Multicast Inefficiencies in Multi-Tenant MEC Infrastructures for 5G Networks

Communication and data networks require the efficient and timely delivery of packets with little or negligible latency in the transmission. This is especially important of 5G mobile networks where mission critical communications and applications are reliant on fast and efficient communications. It has long been understood that using multicasting, as a method of sending multiple packets simultaneously, over a medium will improve the efficiency of a communication. This is achieved by only transmitting multicast packets once to multiple recipients who will then receive the (multicast) packets. This paper identifies the inherent inefficiencies of multicasting when having to encapsulate packets in overlay networks such as those in the Multi-Access/Mobile-Edge to Core 5G infrastructure networks and demonstrate such inefficiencies empirically.