MCDC: Multicast routing leveraging SDN for Data Center networks

Abstract

Software defined networking(SDN) can provide solution to many old problems in networks. In this paper we propose to give an algorithm for multicast routing in data center networks. Minimizing link utilization and reducing latency are the objectives of Data Centers but at the same time increasing throughput is also the other objective. Multicast not only helps to save bandwidth usage but also reduces load on servers and thus can increase the performance of the data centers in terms of link utilization and latency. Application layer multicast solutions do exist but network level multicast always has less latency than its application level counterparts but IP multicast has many challenges from the days of the Internet. PIM-SM which is prevalent multicast routing algorithm cannot leverage the advantages available in Data center networks . Hence a new algorithm specifically designed for data center networks is a need. We propose MCDC(Multicast routing for Data Centers) a SDN enabled algorithm which enables congestion aware multicast routing.