Relay Assignment in AMT-Based Multicast Content Distribution
Suhel Patel, Kamil Saraç, R. Chandrasekaran, Turgay Korkmaz, Neeraj Mittal · 2011
Automatic IP Multicast Without Explicit Tunnels (AMT) has recently been proposed as an enabling technology to expand multicast content availability in the Internet. Using AMT, clients in unicast-only networks can establish tunnels to AMT relay servers to receive multicast content over unicast-only networks. In this paper, we study the task of mapping unicast clients to AMT relay servers in a way to minimize bandwidth use in the content providers' network while maintaining load balanced situation across relays. We formulate the relay assignment problem as an instance of NP-hard bin packing problem and propose different solutions for application scenarios with or without considering client-relay server proximity. Our evaluations demonstrate the potential benefits of the proposed solutions under different scenarios.