Sharing the Cost of Multicast Transmissions

We investigate cost-sharing algorithms for multicast transmission. Economic considerations point to two distinct mechanisms, marginal cost and Shapley value, as the two solutions most appropriate in this context. We prove that the former has a natural algorithm that uses only two messages per link o...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inJournal of computer and system sciences Vol. 63; no. 1; pp. 21 - 41
Main Authors Feigenbaum, Joan, Papadimitriou, Christos H., Shenker, Scott
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Elsevier Inc 01.08.2001
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ISSN0022-0000
1090-2724
DOI10.1006/jcss.2001.1754

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Summary:We investigate cost-sharing algorithms for multicast transmission. Economic considerations point to two distinct mechanisms, marginal cost and Shapley value, as the two solutions most appropriate in this context. We prove that the former has a natural algorithm that uses only two messages per link of the multicast tree, while we give evidence that the latter requires a quadratic total number of messages. We also show that the welfare value achieved by an optimal multicast tree is NP-hard to approximate within any constant factor, even for bounded-degree networks. The lower-bound proof for the Shapley value uses a novel algebraic technique for bounding from below the number of messages exchanged in a distributed computation; this technique may prove useful in other contexts as well.
ISSN:0022-0000
1090-2724
DOI:10.1006/jcss.2001.1754