Clustered Multicast Source Routing for Large-Scale Cloud Data Centers

Abstract

The multi-tenancy concept in cloud data center (DC) networks paves the way towards advancements and innovation in the underlying infrastructure such as network virtualization. Multicast routing is essential in leveraging multi-tenancy to its full potential. However, traditional IP multicast routing is not suitable for DC networks due to the need to support a massive amount of multicast groups and hosts. State-of-the-art DC multicast routing approaches aim to overcome these scalability issues by, for instance, taking advantage of the symmetry of DC topologies and the programmability of DC switches to compactly encode multicast group information inside packets, thereby reducing the overhead resulting from the need to store the states of flows at the network switches. Although these approaches scale well with the number of multicast groups, they do not perform well with group sizes and, as a result, yield substantial traffic control overhead and network congestion. In this article, we present Bert, a scalable source-initiated DC multicast routing approach that scales well with both the number and size of multicast groups through the clustering of multicast group members where each cluster employs its own forwarding rules. Compared to the state-of-the-art approach, Bert yields much less traffic control overhead by significantly reducing packet header sizes and eliminating switch memory usage across the switches.