Efficient Multicast Routing on BCube-Based Data Centers

Multicast group communication has many advantages in data centers and thus is widely used by many applications. It can efficiently reduce the network traffic and improve the application throughput. For the multicast application in data centers, an essential problem is how to find a minimal multicast tree, which has been proved to be NP-hard. In this paper, we propose an approximation tree-building method for the minimal multicast problem, named HD（Hamming Distance）-based multicast tree. Consider that many new network structures have been proposed for data centers. We choose three representative ones, including BCube, FBFLY, and HyperX, whose topological structures can be regarded as the generalized hypercube. Given a multicast group in BCube, the HD-based method can jointly schedule the path from each of receiver to the only sender among multiple disjoint paths; hence, it can quickly construct an efficient multicast tree with the low cost. The experimental results demonstrate that our method consumes less time to construct an efficient multicast tree, while considerably reduces the cost of the multicast tree compared to the representative methods. Our approach for BCube can also be adapted to other generalized hypercube network structures for data centers after minimal modifications.