Application-aware multicast

Measuring the quality of multicast multi-layered applications based only on the amount of data that arrives at the receivers is insufficient in many circumstances. This paper proposes a three-metric approach that improves the global quality/fairness of the multicast sessions. We define a simple function that takes into account the density of satisfied users, the amount of allocated bandwidth in the multicast tree, and the degradation at the receivers. We analyze the proposed multi-criteria algorithm in an environment with other competing flows and show the improvement of the global quality of multicast multi-layered applications.