Performance Evaluation of Multicast Cost Sharing Mechanisms

In this paper we investigate experimentally the performance of marginal cost (MC) and Shapley value (SH) mechanisms for sharing the cost of multicast transmissions. We implement and deploy the MC and SH mechanisms on PlanetLab and study their properties. We compare the execution time of MC and SH mechanisms for the tamper-proof and autonomous node models. We also study the convergence and scalability of the mechanisms by varying the number of nodes and the number of users per node. We show that the MC mechanisms generate a smaller revenue compared to the SH mechanisms and thus they are not favorable for the content provider. From the computational point of view as well as economic considerations, increasing the number of users per node is beneficial for the system implementing these mechanisms.