Intra-session fairness in multicast communications

Zongming Fei, Mengkun Yang

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

5 Scopus citations

Abstract

Multicast communication achieves scalability by sending data to multiple receivers at the same time. Receivers in a multicast session usually share the fate with each other, even though their processing speed and the capacity of the path they use can be quite different. A conventional multicast session usually consists of a single multicast group and the problem is how to set the group rate so that it is fair to both fast and slow receivers, to some extent. In a replicated multicast service, receivers are divided into groups based on their capacities and a multicast session can consist of multiple multicast groups. The question is how to divide receivers into groups exactly and set appropriate group rates so that it is fair to all the receivers. Most of current work focuses on optimizing the social welfare represented as a sum of some performance measures of receivers [Kar et al., 2002; Stoenescu et al., 2003]. In this paper, we define a new concept called intra-session fairness and give an optimal solution that can achieve fairness among receivers in the same session. The goal is to maximize the minimum fairness value of the receivers. The novelty of the framework is that it is independent of the specific definition of the fairness function on individual receivers. We illustrate a layering method to implement the max-min intra-session fair allocation and demonstrate the significant difference in fairness achieved by the maximal social welfare algorithm and the max-min intra-session fairness algorithm.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)235-255
Number of pages21
JournalTelecommunication Systems
Volume29
Issue number4
DOIs
StatePublished - Aug 2005

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grants CCR-0204304 and EIA-0101242, and a grant from the Kentucky Science and Engineering Foundation as per Grant Agreement #KSEF-148-502-05-139 with the Kentucky Science and Technology Corporation.

Funding

This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grants CCR-0204304 and EIA-0101242, and a grant from the Kentucky Science and Engineering Foundation as per Grant Agreement #KSEF-148-502-05-139 with the Kentucky Science and Technology Corporation.

FundersFunder number
Kentucky Science and Technology Corporation
National Science Foundation (NSF)EIA-0101242, CCR-0204304
Kentucky Science and Engineering Foundation-148-502-05-139

    Keywords

    • Fairness
    • Multicast
    • Replicated service

    ASJC Scopus subject areas

    • Electrical and Electronic Engineering

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