Summary: Approximation and Collusion in Multicast Cost Sharing 1
Aaron Archer 2
Cornell University, Operations Research Dept., Ithaca, NY 14853
E­mail: aarcher@orie.cornell.edu
and
Joan Feigenbaum 3 Arvind Krishnamurthy 4 Rahul Sami 5
Yale University, Computer Science Dept., New Haven, CT 06520­8285
E­mail: jf@cs.yale.edu, arvind@cs.yale.edu, sami@cs.yale.edu
and
Scott Shenker 6
ICSI, 1947 Center Street, Berkeley, CA 94704­1198
E­mail: shenker@icsi.berkeley.edu
Version: November 2, 2002
Multicast routing is a technique for transmitting a packet from a single source to multiple receivers
without wasting network bandwidth. To achieve transmission e#ciency, multicast routing constructs a
directed tree that connects the source to all the receivers and sends only one copy of the packet over each
link of the directed tree. When a packet reaches a branch point in the tree, it is duplicated and a copy is sent
over each downstream link. Multicasting large amounts of data to large groups of receivers is likely to incur
significant costs, and these costs need to be covered by payments collected from the receivers. However,
receivers cannot be charged more than what they are willing to pay, and the transmission costs of shared

Source: Archer, Aaron - Algorithms and Optimization Group, AT&T Labs-Research

Collections: Computer Technologies and Information Sciences