On multicast flow control for heterogeneous receivers

In this paper, we study the impact of heterogeneous receivers on the throughput of multicast flow control and propose a new multicast flow control algorithm to optimally partition group members into multiple subgroups. Our main contributions are as follows. First, we cast the multicast flow control problem in the Internet as the list partition problem and then prove that the list partition problem is equivalent to the optimal paging problem in cellular networks. The result is not only interesting in itself but also essential to derive the first known analytical bounds for the throughput of multicast flow control. Furthermore, we propose an algorithm to solve not only the list partition problem but also the optimal paging problem and the problem of bulk data transfer using multiple multicast groups. The complexity of our algorithm is one order less than the best known algorithm designed only for the problem of bulk data transfer using multiple multicast groups in the literature. While earlier work uses simulations to justify the usage of multiple subgroups to deliver information to a large amount of receivers in heterogeneous networks, we provide the first analytical support.