Resource Allocation in Multicast Trees

Mechanisms have been designed to perform resource reservation in a multicast tree in order to provide quality of service. In this paper, we consider how to allocate bandwidth in a multicast tree so as to optimize some global measure of performance. In our model each receiver has a budget to be used for bandwidth reservation on links along its path from the source, and each link has a cost function depending on the amount of total bandwidth reserved at the link by all receivers using that link. We formulate and solve the problem of allocating bandwidth in the multicast tree such that the sum of link costs is minimized.