Comparison of recovery schemes to maximize restorable throughput in multicast networks

Multicast networks have many applications especially in real-time content delivery systems. For high-quality services, users do not expect to witness any interruption; thus, network link failure has to be handled gracefully. In unicast networks there are many approaches for dealing with link failures using backup paths. Recently, Cohen and Nakibly categorized these methods, provided linear programming formulations for optimizing network throughput under the assumption that the paths are splitable, and compared them experimentally. In this work, we take their approach and apply to the multicast failure recovery problem. We propose backup bandwidth allocation algorithms based on linear programs to maximize the throughput, and perform an experimental study on the performance of recovery schemes. We study many recovery schemes in multicast networks and propose a new recovery scheme that performs better than all other recovery scheme except the one that recomputed the whole multicast tree from scratch for each link failure.