Allocating clients to constrained multicast servers: an optimal solution

Multicast communication enables a server to send content to multiple clients at the same time through a multicast tree. To deal with the heterogeneity of client capacities, multiple multicast groups can be used to allocate clients with similar capacity to the same group, so that the performance perceived by clients can be improved. We investigate the problem of allocating clients to constrained multicast servers, which, similar to clients, have different capacities. We explore some interesting issues raised by the constraints and propose an optimal solution to the allocation problem. We evaluate the solution and show substantial performance gain for our algorithm over those considering the server constraints separately.