مدل کسب و کار سودآور چندپخشی

One of the main impediments in wide scale deployment of multicast is lack of a good business model. Any technology needs a good business model to succeed. In this article we present a simple business model for multicast in the Internet that uses the inherent benefits of multicast to make it profitable to all the parties, including the multicast sender, multicast receivers and the network providers, that are involved. Our model is based on the following principle. Multicast receivers should not pay any additional fee for receiving multicast over unicast but might pay for the content, the sender pays for the bandwidth used in multicast to the Internet service provider(s) (ISP) and might charge the receivers for the content. We demonstrate that the use of our model proves profitable to the sender, receivers and the ISPs. We also discuss some deployment issues.

Multicast is an efficient paradigm for transmitting data from a sender to a group of receivers. Multicast incurs lower network bandwidth and end-system costs than broadcast to all receivers or multiple unicasts to individual receivers [6]. One of the main impediments in wide scale deployment of multicast is lack of a good business model. Any technology needs a good business model to succeed. Each of the parties involved must see some advantage in using the technology. In this article we present a simple business model for multicast in the Internet that uses the inherent benefits of multicast to make it profitable to all the parties, including the multicast sender, multicast receivers and the network providers, that are involved. Our model is based on the following principle. Multicast receivers should not pay any extra charge for receiving multicast over unicast, the sender pays for the bandwidth used in multicast to the Internet service providers (ISP) and might charge the receivers for the content. Next, we analyze the sender, receiver and service provider profits. Using our analytical results and the results from the earlier work of Chuang and Sirbu [5], we demonstrate the benefits of our model to all the parties involved. Although we demonstrate the savings available to the sender, receivers and the ISPs using specific results on bandwidth requirements for multicast and certain assumptions about various parameters, our results clearly show that our approach is applicable to other scenarios as well. Last, we also discuss issues related to this model's implementation. The remainder of the article is organized as follows. In Section 2 we briefly examine the existing work on the subject. In Section 3, we present our business model. In Section 4, we analyze the sender, network provider and receiver profits due to using our business model. In Section 5, we make some interesting observations that arise from our formulation. We construct numerical examples to demonstrate the profitability of our model in Section 6. In Section 7, we discuss important deployment issues. Conclusions and suggestions for future work are contained in Section 8.

One of the main reasons for multicast technology not being deployed on a wide scale is the lack of a good business model. We have proposed a simple business model that uses the inherent benefits of multicasting to make it attractive and profitable to all parties, including the sender, the receivers, and the network providers. In our scheme, the responsibility for paying the multicast transmission lies with the sender. Each ISP will calculate its ‘fair’ share of the sender charge based on its local view and knowledge. Receivers will not be charged any additional fee for receiving multicast data. While this principle makes sense from a business point of view, it opens technical challenges that need to be solved outside the scope of this article. Mechanisms need to be in place disabling receivers from joining an arbitrary multicast session, thus increasing the sender's cost. Also, receivers should be prevented from joining non-existent multicast sessions to avoid unnecessary ISP cost. Other issues for future work include verification and security issues, as well as the trust model between ISPs.