Reasoning about multicast in opportunistic networks

Mobile computing services are becoming highly personalized and influenced by user location, social attitudes and interests. This trend is often synthesized with the term behavior-awareness. Behavioral services characterize most of the applications of Opportunistic Networks and advocate a single communication paradigm: multicast. Despite that, multicast is less studied than unicast and broadcast. We believe that there is not correspondence between problem relevance and research attention. This paper focuses on the multicast best effort service in opportunistic networks with the aim of better understanding the problem and defining the guidelines for the design of a novel multicast protocol.