  The great demand for real-time multimedia sessions encompassing groups of
users (multi-user), associated with the limitations of the current Internet in
providing quality assurance, has raised challenges for defining the best
mechanisms to deploy the Next Generation of Networks (NGN). There is a
consensus that an efficient and scalable provisioning of network resources is
crucial for the success of the NGN, mainly in what concerns access networks.
Previous solutions for the control of multi-user sessions rely mostly on
uncoordinated actions to allocate per-flow bandwidth and multicast trees. This
paper introduces a Multiuser Aggregated Resource Allocation mechanism (MARA)
that coordinates the control of class-based bandwidth and multicast resources
in a scalable manner. In comparison with previous work, MARA significantly
reduces signaling, state and processing overhead. The performance benefits of
MARA are analyzed though simulations, which successfully demonstrated the
significant optimization in the network performance.
