Two Approaches to Network Design Problem for Overlay Multicast with Limited Tree Delay - Model and Optimal Results

Abstract

Live multimedia streaming and on-demand stream- ing applications (such as Internet radio or Internet TV) have been gaining more popularity in recent years. They require significant amount of bandwidth from media streaming servers and can easily saturate network infrastructure when the number of participant or bit rate of streaming content increases. Overlay multicast is an effective approach to the problem of streaming distribution. It combines flexibility of application layer multicast with efficiency of network layer multicast. Since overlay networks are built on the top of existing infrastructure, the cost of mainte- nance and deployment of this solution is relatively low compared to traditional Content Distribution Networks (CDN). Based on our previous works, we focus on solving the overlay network design problem to economically distribute content among the participants using overlay multicast. The optimization goal is to minimize the overlay network cost expressed by the cost of access links. Additionally, we assume that the maximum total delay of a streaming tree is upper bounded to provide QoS (Quality of Service) guarantees. We present two approaches to this problem and construct model using Levels and Flow Conservation Constraints. We show how various constraints following from real overlay systems influence the behavior of the distributing system. In numerical experiments we use real ISPs' price lists. To illustrate our approach we present optimal results obtained from the CPLEX solver.