Signaling Protocol for Session-Aware Popularity-based Resource Allocation

The Differentiated Services model (DS) maps traffic into services that offer different quality levels. However, flows are treated unfairly in each service, since the DS model lacks a policy to distribute service bandwidth between flows that form the service aggregate traffic. We present a signaling protocol called Session-Aware Popularity-based Resource Allocation (SAPRA) that fairly distributes resources along the path of each session, with an amount of resources propor-tional to their receiver population. We assume that scalable sessions are layered hierarchically, with each layer sent to a different multicast group. We evaluate the efficiency of SAPRA using theoretical analysis and simulation.