Fairness for ABR multipoint-to-point connections

In multipoint-to-point connections, the traffic at the root (destination) is the combination of all traffic originating at the leaves. A crucial concern in the case of multiple senders is how to define fairness within a multicast group, and among groups and point-to-point connections. Fairness definition can be complicated since the multipoint connection can have the same identifier (VPI/VCI) on each link, and senders might not be distinguishable in this case. Many rate allocation algorithms implicitly assume that there is only one sender in each VC, which does not hold for multipoint-to-point cases. We give various possibilities for defining fairness for multipoint connections, and show the tradeoffs involved. In addition, we show that ATM bandwidth allocation algorithms need to be adapted to give fair allocations for multipoint-to-point connections.