I am a little confused about Android's ability to receive multicast packets using the WifiManager.MulticastLock. From the documentation:
Class Overview
Allows an application to receive Wifi Multicast packets. Normally the Wifi stack filters out packets not explicitly addressed to this device. Acquring a MulticastLock will cause the stack to receive packets addressed to multicast addresses. Processing these extra packets can cause a noticable battery drain and should be disabled when not needed.
802.11 Probe Request frames, which are sent out by client's looking for wireless networks in range, generally use the broadcast MAC address as the destination. Does this imply that an Android app that has acquired a multicast lock is capable of receiving these Probe Requests, or is my understanding of the MulticastLock misguided? I suspect the term multicast may be in reference to Layer 3, (as opposed to Layer 2 broadcast), but because the class overview states Allows an application to receive Wifi Multicast packets, I'm a little uncertain and would like some clarification.
