Multicast Load-Balanced Birkhoff-Von Neumann Switch With Greedy Scheduling

Abstract

Internet traffic is still exhibiting an exponential growth. This exponential growth will certainly be continued given the Internet of Things (IoT) and Internet of Everything (IoE) predictions regarding the number of devices connected to the Internet in the near future. Also, many popular multicast services such as IPTV, distance learning, content distribution, distributive interactive gaming, collaborative computing and others are rapidly increasing amount of the Internet multicast traffic, thus, significantly contributing to the Internet traffic growth. The routers are typically designed to cope with unicast traffic. Multicast traffic can negatively impact performance of such routers and cause significant degradation of overall network performance. Hence, due to increasing importance and increasing amount of multicast traffic, there is a great need for a scalable switch architecture that efficiently forwards both unicast and multicast traffic. In this paper, we propose a novel scalable, efficient and frugal multicast switch architecture based on load balanced Birkhoff-von Neumann switch with greedy scheduling that achieves stable performance even at very high traffic loads. The proposed switch is compared to other popular multicast switch solutions. Comparison shows that our proposed multicast switch architecture outperforms other solutions in all tested common traffic scenarios at the most critical (highest) traffic loads.