Research on the maximal throughput for layered multicast

This paper investigates the maximal achievable multi-rate throughput problem of a layered multicast session at the presence of network coding. Firstly formulated is the maximal achievable throughput problem with the assumption that the data layers are independent and layer rates are static. It is proved that the problem in this case is NP-hard. Meanwhile an upper bound of maximal achievable multi-rate throughput is presented.