Cost Sharing Methods for Multicast Services and Probability Distribution of Shared Cost

In multicast-type services, many users share a single data flow. The question is how to split the cost of such a flow among the users. There is a need to provide users with reasonable feedback on the cost that their network usage incurs. Therefore, cost sharing methods will play an important role in multicast-type services in the future. This paper discusses cost sharing methods where many users share multicast flows and describes how these costs are shared among the members of multicast groups. We consider the case where an Information Provider provides users with multicast-type video streaming services by using the network resources owned by an Internet Service Provider. First, we consider some cost sharing methods to determine the charge in a multicast-type services and then calculate the probability distribution of the shared cost.