Flexible, Efficient, and Scalable Software-Defined Over-the-Top Multicast for ISP Environments With DynSdm

Abstract

A number of today's over-the-top (OTT) services could greatly benefit from a flexible, efficient, and scalable network-layer multicast support on the Internet. IP multicast showed not to meet these requirements, hindering its adoption in more than individual network islands. As a consequence, content delivery networks (CDNs) emerged as alternative and implemented one-to-many multicasting at the application layer. Yet, due to practical reasons and conflicting stakeholder interests, CDN deployments usually end at the border of Internet service provider networks, making one-to-many deliveries at an Internet-scale challenging up to date. In a previous work, the authors presented software-defined multicast (Sdm) to mitigate this problem by unlocking network-layer multicast support for OTT services inside ISP networks. In this paper, DYNSDM is proposed to complement Sdm in key aspects, allowing for a more holistic support of relevant scenarios aspects, and enabling a fine-granular traffic engineering of multicast traffic inside ISP networks. For this, DYNSDM presents a detailed design of the ISP-internal traffic and service management process and introduces a set of novel SDN-based network-layer mechanisms for traffic load balancing as well as handling of group and network dynamics. DYNSDM was implemented as prototype and extensively evaluated, showing its flexibility, high traffic efficiency, good scalability, and superior ability to balance traffic load inside ISP networks.