Cross-Monotonic Multicast

—In the routing and cost sharing of multicast towards a group of potential receivers, cross-monotonicity is a property that states a user’s payment can only be smaller when serviced in a larger set. Being cross-monotonic has been shown to be the key in achieving group-strategyproofness. We study multicast schemes that target optimal flow routing, cross-monotonic cost sharing, and budget balance. We show that no multicast scheme can satisfy these three properties simultaneously, and resort to approximate budget balance instead. We derive both positive and negative results that complement each other for directed and undirected networks. We show that in directed networks, no cross-monotonic scheme can recover a constant fraction of optimal multicast cost. We provide a simple scheme that does achieve 1 k -budget-balance, where k is the number of receivers. Using a probabilistic method rooted in random graph theory, we prove an upper-bound of 2√ k for the budget balance ratio. For un...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: INFOCOM
• Authors: Zongpeng Li
• Keywords: Budget Balance, Communications, INFOCOM 2008, Multicast, Undirected Networks