P. sterberg and T. Zhang (Sweden)
Multicast, Fairness, Bandwidth Allocation, Layered Video
As multicast is slowly gaining in support, the concept of multicast fairness is starting to attract some attention. Should multicast flows be favored at the expense of unicast flows, and if so to what extent? Allocating link bandwidth in proportion to the logarithm of the number of receivers of a flow has been proposed. That kind of policies favors multicast flows, without totally starving unicast flows. A problem of maintaining such policies emerges if layered multicast flows are introduced, since each layer is transmitted to a separate multicast IP address and will therefore be treated as an individual flow. Layered multicast flows will consequently be allocated too much bandwidth. In this paper, a logarithmic bandwidth-allocation policy that copes with layered multicast is proposed and evaluated through simulations. The results confirm that the proposal meets the expectations by preserving the intended fairness properties in scenarios with layered multicast traffic.
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