Multicast Service Overlay Design

Recently, the notion of Multicast Service Overlay Network (MSON) has been introduced to address some of the deployment and maintenance problems of IP multicast and application-level multicast. Basically, an MSON is a backbone service overlay provisioned by an MSON provider and designed to “multiplex” several user overlays. The MSON provider designs the backbone overlay for a large user population and can therefore enjoy large scale economies and benefits. Since the deployment of an MSON is a capitalintensive investment, it is very imperative to carefully design the MSON so that the ISP can make the best revenue out of this investment. In this paper, we formulate the backbone design problem by taking into account ISP operational costs. We divide it into three sub-problems: overlay proxy placement, overlay link selection, and bandwidth dimensioning. We propose several algorithms for each of these subproblems. Through simulations, we study the effectiveness of different overlay design algorithms, analyze their impact on multicast performance, and suggest some practical solutions for MSON design.