Sonia Fahmy, Raj Jain, Rohit Goyal and Bobby Vandalore, "ATM ABR Multipoint-to-point Connections and Fairness Issues," Submitted to IEEE Network Magazine, June 1999.
Abstract:
In multipoint-to-point connections, multiple sources can concurrently send data to the same destination. A crucial concern in this case is how to define fairness within a multicast group, and among multicast groups and unicast connections. The multipoint connection can have the same identifier on each link, and senders might not be distinguishable. Many Available Bit Rate (ABR) rate allocation algorithms implicitly assume that there is only one sender in each connection, which does not hold for multipoint-to-point cases. We give four fairness definitions for multipoint connections based on connections, senders or flows, and we discuss the tradeoffs involved. In addition, we show that ATM bandwidth allocation algorithms need to be adapted to give fair allocations for multipoint-to-point connections.
Complete Paper in Adobe Acrobat (4,048,996 Bytes)