Fair bandwidth management for multipoint-to-point ABR connections is an extremely important problem. In multipoint-to-point connections, the traffic at the root (destination) is the sum of all traffic originating at the leaves. The most crucial concern in the case of multiple senders is how to define fairness within a multipoint group and among multipoint groups and point-to- point connections. This can be complicated since the multipoint connection can have the same identifier (VPI/VCI) on each link, and senders might not be distinguishable in this case. We give various possibilities for defining fairness, and show the tradeoffs involved. In addition, we show that switch algorithms need to be adapted to give fair allocations for multipoint-to-point connections. This is because many rate allocation algorithms implicitly assume that there is only one sender in each VC, which does not hold for multipoint-to-point cases.

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