Multicasting Tabu Search Mechanism with near optimum multicast tree on OpenFlow

Abstract

Many group communication applications require multipoint communication, in order to reduce network traffic rates. Multicast technology has been used as an efficient and scalable technology for data distribution. However, in the IP multicast, the responsibility for management of multicast groups is distributed among network routers, that cause some limitations, such as generate delays in processing group events, high bandwidth consumption and redundant tree calculation. Software Defined Networking (SDN) represented by openflow presented as a solution for many problems, in SDN the control plane and data plane are separated by shifting the control and management to a remote centralized controller, and the routers are used as a forwarder only. In this paper we will proposed and implement multicasting openflow controller, this centralized controller is a core part in our multicasting approach, which is responsible for constructing the multicast tree, handling the multicast group events and multicast state maintenance. Forwarders, forward the multicast packet based on multicast routing entries which were generated by the centralized controller. Tabu search will be used as heuristic algorithm for construction near optimum multicast tree and maintain multicast tree to still near optimum in case of join in or leave any members from multicast group (group events). This algorithm will be implemented as openflow modules. And will be compared with traditional IP multicast