A Plug-in Framework for Efficient Multicast Using SDN

The great variety of modern networked applications, e.g., online computer games, cloud host backups, video conferencing, etc. bring significant differences in their usage scenarios. Therefore, they impose very different QoS (Quality of Service) requirements on network communication. In particular, traditional multicast implementations cannot react adequately to the potentially very dynamic application requirements at run time. In this paper, we suggest a novel Plug-in Multicast Framework (PiMF) placed on top of an existing multicast framework. PiMF can modify the topology of the multicast tree during the application’s run time, thus providing QoS guarantees for multicast communication. We design our plug-in framework using the emerging SDN (Software-Defined Networking) technology, and we especially address the challenge of non-interfering behavior of PiMF with respect to the underlying multicast implementation. We evaluate the correctness and performance of our plug-in framework in detailed simulation experiments.