Cost-based Pricing for Multicast Streaming Services

In multicast-type services, many receivers share a single data flow. The question is how to split the cost of such a flow among the receivers. There is a need to provide receivers 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 receivers share multicast flows and describes how these costs are shared among the members of multicast groups. We consider the case where an information provider (sender) provides receivers with multicast-type video streaming services by using the network resources owned by a telecommunication carrier. First, we consider some cost sharing methods to determine the charge in multicast-type streaming services and then calculate the shared cost to analyze the cost structure of multicast-type streaming services.