Traffic Engineering and Manageability for Multicast Traffic in Hybrid SDN

Multicast communication can effectively reduce network resources consumption in contrast with unicast. With the advent of SDN, current researches on multicast traffic are mainly conducted in the SDN scenario, thus to mitigate the problems of IP multicast such as the unavoidable difficulty in traffic engineering and high security risk. However, migration to SDN cannot be achieved in one step, hybrid SDN emerges as a transitional networking form for ISP network. In hybrid SDN, for acquiring similar TE and security performance as in SDN multicast, we redirect every multicast traffic to an appropriate SDN node before reaching the destinations of the multicast group, thus to build up a core-based multicast tree substantially which is first introduced in CBT. Based on the core SDN node, it is possible to realize dynamic control over the routing paths to benefit traffic engineering (TE), while multicast traffic manageability can also be obtained, e.g., access control and middlebox-supported network services. On top of that, multiple core-based multicast trees are constructed for each multicast group by fully taking advantage of the routing flexibility of SDN nodes, in order to further enhance the TE performance. The multicast routing and splitting (MRS) algorithm is proposed whereby we jointly and efficiently determine an appropriate core SDN node for each group, as well as optimizing the traffic splitting fractions for the corresponding multiple core-based trees to minimize the maximum link utilization. We conduct simulations with different SDN deployment rate in real network topologies. The results indicate that, when 40% of the SDN switches are deployed in HSDN as well as calculating 2 trees for each group, HSDN multicast adopting MRS algorithm can obtain a comparable TE performance to SDN multicast.