Towards Efficient Multicast Communication in Software-Defined Networks

Abstract

The emerging Software-Defined Networks (SDN) offer several advantages over traditional networking technologies. We explore how multicast communication required in many important applications can be organized and implemented efficiently in SDN. Our contributions in this paper are as follows: 1) We propose and implement a simple yet powerful multicast scheme for SDN that gives the sender full control over the members of multicast groups which is absent in traditional IP multicast, 2) We develop algorithms for calculating multicast trees based on Branch-Aware Modification (BAM) and Early Branching (EB) techniques that together allow for maximally reusing unicast flow table entries in SDN switches, thereby improving the scalability of our SDN multicast, 3) We implement our approach as an extendable module within the open-source SDN controller Floodlight. Our approach and its implementation are evaluated using Mininet simulation and experiments in a real OpenFlow-enabled network.