COST-ANALYSIS OF MULTICAST TRANSPORT ARCHITECTURES IN MULTISERVICE NETWORKS

The paper provides a cost analysis of multicast channels in terms of t ransport resources allocated by the network, The analysis takes into a ccount the diverse transport requirements of applications in multiserv ice networks such as multisource broadcasting of data to a common set of destinations, bidirectional/unidirectional data transfers among ent ities, and variable transfer rates of data, The cost model consists of mapping the transport attributes to resource demands and computing th e network-wide resource consumptions for data transport. The cost anal ysis is independent of the specifics of the backbone network transport ing the multicast data and, hence, can provide a network-independent m easure of the cost-effectiveness of various multicast architectures. T he usefulness of the cost model is illustrated by analyzing multicast data transport costs in ''group shared tree'' (CST) and ''source-speci fic tree'' (SST) architectures, with both empirical and simulation stu dies, The cost analysis methodology can be useful in the design and/or evaluation of multiservice data transport architectures. It cant also offer a basis for the network provider to implement customer billing functions in a ''pay-for-service'' type of network management environm ent envisaged for multiservice networks.