Fair allocation of resources in multirate multicast trees

We study fairness in arbitrary networks with multicast capabilities. Multicast traffic in the Internet and ATM provides a motivation for studying these networks. A study of fairness in multicast networks poses several interesting problems e.g., the issue of intra-session fairness in addition to that of inter-session fairness in unicast networks. We develop a mathematical framework to model the fair allocation of bandwidth in multicast networks with minimum and maximum rate constraints. We present an algorithm for computation of maxmin fair rates allocated to various source-destination pairs. This algorithm may be used to make a fair allocation of layers to various receivers for loss-tolerant traffic. We also outline several interesting open research problems in this area.