Managing Multicast Membership for Software Defined Data Center Network

Abstract

In this paper we design DCMA, a novel multicast membership management scheme for data center networks. Unlike traditional protocols like IGMP/MLD, DCMA leverages the characteristics of data center multicast application and the emerging software defined networking (SDN) technique to manage multicast members in an easier and better way. Multicast application master delivers the membership to the SDN controller, and the SDN controller assigns the group addresses in a coordinated way to minimize the forwarding table size in switches. In particular, by formulating the multicast group address allocation problem and capturing the relationship among forwarding entries in different switches, we design both a batch algorithm and an incremental algorithm to allocate the multicast group addresses. Evaluations based on real-world traces show that, DCMA can save almost half multicast forwarding entries in switches compared with random multicast address allocation.