Relay Assignment in AMT-Based Multicast Content Distribution

Automatic IP Multicast Without Explicit Tunnels (AMT) has recently been proposed as an enabling technology to expand multicast content availability in the Internet. Using AMT, clients in unicast-only networks can establish tunnels to AMT relay servers to receive multicast content over unicast-only networks. In this paper, we study the task of mapping unicast clients to AMT relay servers in a way to minimize bandwidth use in the content providers' network while maintaining load balanced situation across relays. We formulate the relay assignment problem as an instance of NP-hard bin packing problem and propose different solutions for application scenarios with or without considering client-relay server proximity. Our evaluations demonstrate the potential benefits of the proposed solutions under different scenarios.