Minimizing One-to-Many File Transfer Times using Multipath-Multicast with Reed-Solomon Coding

Abstract

One-to-many file transfers in a fast and efficient manner are essential to meet the growing need for sharing, duplicating, or migrating a large-sized data and software among distributed servers or sites. We previously proposed the Multipath-Multicast (MPMC) file transfer scheme to deliver a file from a single sender to multiple recipients on fully-controlled OpenFlow networks with bandwidth-guaranteed full-duplex links. In MPMC, a file is appropriately divided into equally-sized blocks; different blocks are concurrently transmitted to the same recipient on multiple paths while the same block is by multicast. Our goal is to design an optimal one-to-many file transfer schedule for each recipient to complete the file retrieval in its lower-bound time, i.e., the file size divided by its max-flow capacity. However, such an optimal schedule does not always exist solely in MPMC, and it is sometimes hard to find on complex network topologies. Therefore, in this paper, we newly introduce the coded-MPMC. In this scheme, the sender generates appropriate coded blocks from N original blocks; the use of coded blocks helps to design an optimal schedule because each recipient can restore the file by receiving any N of either original or coded blocks in total. In addition, some heuristic procedures are developed to realize an optimal schedule. Through simulations on large-scale real-world network topologies, the proposed scheme is shown to efficiently find an optimal schedule that realizes the theoretical bounds in terms of the file retrieval time of every recipient. A preliminary implementation on OpenFlow also shows the fundamental feasibility of coded-MPMC.