Topological effect on optimal partitioning of multicast trees

Loss recovery is crucial for reliable multicast. Tree-based multicast protocols often use hierarchical loss recovery where some special receivers or routers are assigned for retransmission handling of each domain. It is obvious that placements of these special receivers or routers have influence on multicast performance. The total bandwidth consumption greatly depends on the partitioning of the tree, i.e, placements of special receivers or routers. The optimal partitioning also depends on topology of networks for each subgroup. In this paper the effects of topology on optimal placements are analyzed using bandwidth consumption as a criteria for hierarchical reliable multicast.