Optimal distributed multicast routing using network coding
Yi Cui, Yuan Xue, Klara Nahrstedt · ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review · 2004
Optimal data routing in a network can be often understood as a multicommodity flow problem. Given a network and a set of commodities, i.e., a set of source-destination pairs, one tries to achieve certain optimization goal, such as minimum delay, maximum throughput, while maintaining certain fairness among all commodities. The constraints of such optimization problems are usually network link capacity and traffic demand of each commodity. Multicommodity flow problem has been well studied as a typical linear programming problem. Its distributed solutions have also been proposed[2].