Bounds on end-to-end statistical delay and jitter in multiple multicast coded packet networks

Network coding is a paradigm in data transport that allows a network node to code information flows before forwarding them. While it has been theoretically proven that network coding saves bandwidth and increases throughput of multicast communication, it does not directly consider the quality of service (QoS) requirements of multicast routing. In this paper, we study the problem of establishing minimum-cost, multiple multicast sessions over coded packet networks to meet the statistical QoS target considering bounded end-to-end statistical delay and jitter from source to each destination. For this purpose, we first propose a path-based formulation for the problem and prove that this problem is NP-hard. Then, in order to obtain an exact solution, we present an effective and efficient decomposition approach in which the problem is decomposed into master problem and subproblems, and the solution is built up successively by feasible path generation. Computational results on random networks show that the proposed method provides an efficient way for solving the problem, even for relatively large networks.