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Summary: IEEE JOURNAL OF SELECTED AREAS ON COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. XX, NO. Y, MONTH, 2002 1
Multicast Server Selection: Problems, Complexity
and Solutions
Zongming Fei, Mostafa Ammar, Ellen Zegura
Abstract|
We formulate and investigate fundamental problems that
arise when multicast servers, that deliver content to multi-
ple clients simultaneously, are replicated to enhance scala-
bility and performance. Our study consists of two parts.
First, we consider the problem under the assumption that
the multicast clients are static for the duration of the mul-
ticast content distribution session. In this context, we ex-
amine two models for server behavior: xed-rate servers,
which transmit at a constant rate, and rate-adaptive servers,
which adapt their transmission rate based on network con-
ditions and/or feedback from clients. In both cases, we show
that general versions of the client assignment problems are
NP-complete. We then develop and evaluate eÆcient algo-
rithms for interesting special cases, as well as heuristics for
general cases. Second, we consider the case in which the
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