On scheduling concurrent multicast sessions over resource reserved network

Resource reserved network can provide guaranteed quality of service to end users, especially those services requiring high bandwidth and short delay, such as video conferencing, video on demand, etc. In this paper, we consider the multicast packing problem, where multiple multicast sessions request network services simultaneously. To maximize the profit, network service provider need to carefully schedule these multicast sessions under the capacity constraint. We first formulate the problem as an integer programming problem and propose an optimization algorithm using branch-and-bound technique. A valid upper bound and a lower bound are then derived by using a statistical method and a greedy heuristic, respectively. The simulation results illustrate that our optimization algorithm performs effectively within the two boundaries.