On Max-min Intra-session Fairness in Replicated Multicast Services

Replicated multicast service deals with the well-known problem of heterogeneity by dividing receivers into multiple multicast groups. Most of current work focuses on optimizing the social welfare represented as a sum of some performance measures of receivers. In this paper we define a new concept called intra-session fairness and present an optimal solution to achieve fairness among receivers in the same session. The goal is to maximize the minimum fairness value of the receivers. The novelty of the framework is that it is independent of the specific definition of the fairness function. We illustrate a layering method to implement the max-min intra-session fair allocation and demonstrate the significant difference in fairness achieved by the maximal social welfare algorithm and the max-min intra-session fairness algorithm.