Cost analysis of multicast transport architectures in multiservice networks

The paper provides a cost analysis of multicast channels in terms of transport resources allocated by the network. The analysis takes into account the diverse transport requirements of applications in multiservice networks such as multisource broadcasting of data to a common set of destinations, bidirectional/unidirectional data transfers among entities, and variable transfer rates of data. The cost model consists of mapping the transport attributes to resource demands and computing the network-wide resource consumptions for data transport. The cost analysis is independent of the specifics of the backbone network transporting the multicast data and, hence, can provide a network-independent measure of the cost-effectiveness of various multicast architectures. The usefulness of the cost model is illustrated by analyzing multicast data transport costs in "group shared tree" (GST) and "source-specific tree" (SST) architectures, with both empirical and simulation studies. The cost analysis methodology can be useful in the design and/or evaluation of multiservice data transport architectures. It can also offer a basis for the network provider to implement customer billing functions in a "pay-for-service" type of network management environment envisaged for multiservice networks.