— Multiple description coding (MDC) has emerged as a powerful technique for reliable real-time communications over lossy packet networks. In its basic form, it involves encoding a media stream into r substreams that are sent independently from a source to a destination. Each substream (or description) can be decoded independent of the other r − 1 substreams. With every successful reception of a substream, the quality of the decoded signal improves. In this paper, we consider the problem of placing a set of servers in the network such that a desired quality of service can be provided to a community of clients that request MDC-coded traffic. We formulate the server placement (SP) problem, with the goal of identifying the minimum number of server locations that can provide r descriptions to a set of clients such that the delay associated with each path from a chosen server location to a given client is bounded by a given delay constraint and the total “unreliability” associated w...