Multicast Topology Research Articles

SDN and NFV enabled service function multicast mechanisms over hybrid infrastructure

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) are two new paradigms which can accelerate service provisioning. Specifically, NFV decouples proprietary network functions from the hardware and implements them in the form of software which is referred to as Virtual Network Function (VNF). In this way, NFV offers great flexibility for service composition and provision. SDN decouples network control from data forwarding and provides a centralized orchestrator for managing and guiding the provision process of services. However, in the context of SDN and NFV, most researches focus on provisioning the unicast service, while the multicast service provision problem lacks sufficient research. The NFV-enabled multicast is important, which involves not only constructing the multicast topology, deploying and chaining VNFs, but also steering traffic through required VNFs before reaching destinations. In this paper, we propose three efficient heuristics to solve the static, dynamic and scalable multicast problems in the context of SDN and NFV. In particular, the static multicast means that end users do not join or leave the multicast session until it ends, while the dynamic multicast means that end users can join or leave dynamically. The scalable multicast means that network functions can be added to or removed from the multicast service dynamically. The novel strategy of the three heuristics is decoupling traffic forwarding and function deployment. With the decoupling, NFV-enabled multicast can be implemented in multiple stages, during which we can achieve a certain extent of reliability by selectively deploying multiple function instances of the same type. In addition, such decoupling also enables adding or removing functions for multicast services easily, which means that we can also achieve a certain extent of function scalability. The experiment results are achieved under the hybrid environment and show that the proposed heuristics can effectively address the multicast problem in the context of SDN and NFV.

Joint Optimization for Multicast Provisioning in Mixed-Line-Rate Optical Networks With a Column Generation Approach

Mixed-line-rate (MLR) optical networks (e.g., 10/40/100 Gb/s) offer a new paradigm in backbone networks to meet the increasing traffic demands. They are considered as a transitional solution for future flexible and dynamic optical networks. In order to provision multicast in MLR optical networks, we need to address multicast routing, line rate selection, and wavelength assignment subproblems, while still respecting the maximum transmission reach. In this paper, we investigate the multicast provisioning problem, which aims at minimizing the total cost on transponder, wavelength channel, and wavelength usage. First, a lightpath-based joint integer linear programming (ILP) model is formulated to minimize the total cost. To overcome the scalability of this joint ILP model, a decomposition approach based on column generation is proposed, which achieves comparable results within an extremely short period of time. Extensive simulations are performed to study the impact on the total cost of multicast provisioning with the MLR regarding the number of multicast sessions, destinations, traffic amount, and network topologies. It is observed that the multicast provisioning with the MLR has significant total cost savings over the single line rate, especially in the scenarios of a large number of multicast sessions and in optical networks with small average nodal degree.

Reliability and delay analysis of multicast in binary molecular communication

Molecular communication is a new and promising communication technology. However, we consider that molecular communication easily suffers from high unreliability and long delay due to the stochastic behavior of the molecules in a biological environment, thus it is essential to investigate the characteristics of reliability and delay in molecular communication. In this paper, we analyze the reliability and delay in multicast topology based on binary molecular communication model. First, we give the mathematical expressions of reliability and delay in different scenarios including a single link, a single path and multicast topology, respectively. In particular, we use retransmission mechanism for transmission failure. Then the numerical results derived from the simulation performances show how the parameters including diffusion coefficient, the distance between transmitter nanomachine and receiver nanomachine, the number of molecules emitted in each time slot, the number of slots and each time slot duration have impacts on reliability and delay. More importantly, under the same reliability, lower delay can be theoretically realized by binary molecular communication model compared to the concentration model of virus-based nanonetworks.

Routing Algorithms for Network Function Virtualization Enabled Multicast Topology on SDN

Many multicast services such as live multimedia distribution and real-time event monitoring require multicast mechanisms that involve network functions (e.g., firewall and video transcoding). Network function virtualization (NFV) is a concept that proposes using virtualization to implement network functions on infrastructure building block (such as high volume servers and virtual machines), where software provides the functionality of existing purpose-built network equipment. We present an approach for building the multicast mechanism whereby multicast flows are processed by NFV before reaching their end users. We propose a routing algorithm and a method for building an appropriate multicast topology.

Implementation and Verification of Dissemination of Tree Structure Data using Signature Scheme for XML Data

With wide spread use of digital data communication on networks, security of data has become an important issue which provides integrity and confidentiality of content that ensures the distribution of information appropriately. While dealing with encoded content in the context of XML, its hierarchical tree structure has different level of confidentiality and integrity for various portion of the same content. Thus it imposes the need of dissemination approach specifically tailored for XML data to address the issues of efficiency and scalability. However these characteristics must be achieved without compromising the security and privacy of contents. The goal of efficient proposed Signature scheme for secure & selective distribution of XML content is to provide uniform platform for different data representation for secure and efficient availability of data. Proposed Signature Scheme is used to detect the change of content at information providers to discover and deliver new content to users. This can be achieved using structural properties of hierarchical tree structure data model with multicast topology approach.

A Multicast Algorithm for Wireless Sensor Networks Based on Network Coding

We propose a set of distributed algorithms for improving the multicast throughput in wireless sensor networks. To this end, network coding is applied when exploiting path diversity with two disjoint paths to each multicast group receiver. We depart from the traditional wisdom that the multicast topology from source to receivers needs to be a tree and propose a novel and distributed algorithm to construct a 2-redundant multicast graph (a directed acyclic graph) as the multicast topology, on which network coding is applied. We conduct both analytical and simulation-based studies to evaluate the effectiveness and performance of our algorithm.

Topology-aware fanout set division scheme for QoS-guaranteed multicast transmission

The proliferation of realtime multimedia services requires huge amounts of data transactions demanding strict quality-of-service (QoS) guarantees. Multicast transmission is a promising technique because of its efficient network resource utilization. However, high head-of-line (HOL) blocking probability and lack of service-specific QoS control should be addressed for practical implementations of multicast networks. In this paper, a topology aware fanout set division (TAFD) scheme is proposed to resolve these problems. The proposed scheme is composed of two techniques that reduce HOL blocking probability and expedite packet delivery for large-delay branches regarding multicast tree topology. Since management of global topology information is not necessary, scalability of the proposed scheme is guaranteed. Mathematical analysis investigates effects of the proposed scheme and derives optimal operational parameters. The evaluation results show that the TAFD scheme achieves significant delay reduction and satisfies required delay bounds on various multicast networks.

Peer-to-Peer Multicasting Inspired by Huffman Coding

Stringent QoS requirements of video streaming are not addressed by the delay characteristics of highly dynamic peer-to-peer (P2P) networks. To solve this problem, a novel locality-aware method for choosing optimal neighbors in live streaming multicast P2P overlays is presented in this paper. To create the appropriate multicast tree topology, a round-trip-time (RTT) value is used as a parameter distinguishing peers capabilities. The multicast tree construction is based on the Huffman source coding algorithm. First, a centrally managed version is presented, and then an effective use of a distributed paradigm is shown. Performance evaluation results prove that the proposed approach considerably improves the overlay efficiency from the viewpoint of end-users and content providers. Moreover, the proposed technique ensures a high level of resilience against gateway-link failures and adaptively reorganizes the overlay topology in case of dynamic, transient network fluctuations.

Multicast scheduling algorithm supporting spatial mini-slot reuse for IEEE 802.16 mesh networks

In this paper, we propose a mechanism for multicast data transmission in IEEE 802.16 mesh networks aimed at increasing the throughput by incorporating mini-slot spatial reuse. The proposed mechanism includes two novel algorithms: a source-based multicast tree topology construction algorithm followed by an interference-aware multicast scheduling algorithm. The proposed multicast interference-aware scheduling algorithm can be applied to both source-based and rendezvous-based multicast tree topologies. Results of our simulation study show that in comparison to the mechanism used for the IEEE 802.16's standard, the proposed multicast tree generation algorithm reduces the number of consumed mini-slots by 64% on average. Moreover, using the proposed interference-aware scheduling algorithm decreases the number of required mini-slots by a further 22% on average. Therefore, the proposed multicast scheduling mechanism shows a higher throughput than the previous approaches and it is more scalable with respect to increasing the number of multicast groups as well as increasing the number of members inside each multicast group.

Multi-hop multicast path construction in modern wireless relay networks

In recent years, multicast over wireless access networks has become a popular research topic. However, if relay nodes are supported in such a network, forming an efficient multicast topology becomes a challenging task. Since existing works fail to solve this problem satisfyingly, we in this paper propose a multi-hop multicast routing scheme for modern wireless relay networks. First, we formulate this important problem as Multi-Hop Multicast Maximization (MHMM), which involves forming a resource allocation of the base-station and relay stations in order to maximize the number of recipients with the given resource budget and channel conditions. To solve MHMM, we propose a heuristic called Multi-Hop Path Selection (MHPS). We prove that MHMM is NP-complete, and also analyze MHPS’s computational complexity and its worst-case performance. The results of simulations conducted to evaluate the heuristic’s performance demonstrate that, under variant conditions, MHPS utilizes bandwidth resources and relay nodes effectively such that it significantly outperforms all existing approaches. Moreover, its performance difference to the optimum is bounded. To the best of our knowledge, MHPS is the only scheme that focuses on this important issue and achieves such a satisfactory performance.

Group Oriented Renewal of Secrets and Its Application to Secure Multicast

This paper introduces a multicast method for renewing secrets which are shared by a set of hosts. The method is centralized, secure, efficient, scalable to a reasonable size and compatible with any multicast topology configuration underneath. It can be used to achieve privacy in a centralized multicast overlay. Additionally, the method can be used to renew an asymmetric key pair when a cryptosystem based on discrete logarithm is used. Knowledge of the public key is then restricted to the group it is communicated to. Security and scalability are discussed, and a comparison with other well-known alternatives is shown.

Relay Ability Estimation and Topology Control Using Multidimensional Context Parameters for Mobile P2P Multicast

We focus on mobile P2P multicast, in which mobile end nodes not only act as receivers but also relay the received stream forward to others. In mobile P2P multicast, negative effects caused by the change of available bandwidth and the disconnection of mobile nodes are propagated to the downstream nodes. To solve this problem, we developed a novel node-allocation framework using the multidimensional context parameters of each mobile node, which include available bandwidth, disconnection rate, and the remaining battery capacity. Considering the significance of each parameter, our method integrates these parameters into a single parameter called relay ability. Taking the relay ability into account, each node is allocated to the multicast topology to minimize the negative effects mentioned above. To test our method, we applied our framework to conventional P2P multicast topology and show the results from comparative evaluations through computer simulation.

Study on Schemes for Seamless Multicast Handover in the Proxy Mobile IPv6 Based on Wireless Networks

The research was carried on centered about the key technology in the Proxy Mobile Ipv6 networks. The frame based on multi-level domains multicast agent was proposed. And the multi-level domains multicast agent who can be collocated easily was also introduced. The different service area of multi-level domains multicast agent is overlapped which can avoid “single point of failure.” The router advertisements of Ipv6 discovered the dynamic change of availed multi-level domains multicast agent and network topology. An ASMM (Auto Study Mobile Multicast) program was proposed on the based frame of multi-level domains multicast agent. The way of sending multicast data in outer region can be chosen neatly taking advantage of the number of mobile host in outer region according to the network situation in this program instead of sending multicast data in only one mode which achieved seamless handover. In recent years, the rapid development of internet and mobile networks makes people demand the combination of internet and mobile networks more and more eagerly which can provide extensive business for mobile users. And multicast is a very promising technology in mobile network. It can enable a group of mobile users to receive the message from the same business source at the same time which improved network efficiency greatly [1]. The mobile multicast technology is facing many problems. Firstly, all multicast technology was designed for fixed host; the multicast tree established on these agreements can be changed easily. And it will cost much if it is changed; Secondly, The mobile multicast technology not only considers the dynamic change of every group members but also the location dynamic change of every group members [2, 3]. So, the mobile multicast technology is a research focus at present. IETF and many researchers proposed much mobile multicast agreement. But these agreements have different inadequateness.

A Survey of Multicast Routing Protocols for Ad-Hoc Wireless Networks

Many network applications require transmitting the same single copy of data packets concurrently to many destinations, it is called multicasting. Wired and infrastructure-based wireless networks are supported by many multicast routing protocols. But, applying this concept in Mobile Ad hoc wireless NETworks (MANETs) is a big challenge. Ad hoc wireless networks composed of self-organized mobile nodes that can move arbitrarily without any preexisting communication infrastructure base stations. It causes producing dynamic and unpredictable network topology. Many proposals are introduced trying to solve multicast supporting problem in MANETs. In this paper, multicast routing protocols in MANETs that was proposed in recent years will be classified according to different view points such as multicast topology, topology initialization, topology maintenance, core or coreless approach, and dependency on unicast routing protocols.

Local and dynamic analysis of Internet multicast router topology

We study data on routers topology gathered using IGMP messages. Although this mechanism is limited to multicast routers we show that it allows getting precise information on the local topology of routers. This information is difficult to obtain with classical tools based on traceroute. Moreover its low cost allows to frequently collect data and to study the dynamics of this topology.

An improved algorithm for multicast topology discovery from end‐to‐end measurements

AbstractWe present a new multicast topology inference algorithm called binary loss tree classification with hop count (HBLT). HBLT improves the previous algorithm of binary loss tree classification (BLT) not only in time complexity but also in misclassification probability and inference accuracy. The time complexity of HBLT is O(l2) instead of O(l3) required by BLT in the worst case, and O(l · log l) instead of O(l3) by BLT in the expected case, where l is the number of receivers in the multicast network. The misclassification probability of HBLT decreases more quickly than that of BLT as the number of probe packets increases. For correct classification, the inference accuracy of HBLT is always 1, i.e. the inferred tree is identical to the physical tree, whereas that of BLT is dependent on the shape of the physical tree and inversely proportional to the number of internal nodes with single child. We also show through simulation that HBLT requires fewer probe packets to infer the correct topology and hence has a lower misclassification probability and higher inference accuracy than BLT. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Multicast-based inference for topology and network-internal loss performance from end-to-end measurements

The use of multicast traffic as measurement probes is effective to infer network-internal characteristics. In this paper, we propose novel approaches to infer multicast network topology and link loss performance from end-to-end measurements. First, we present a new algorithm, binary hamming distance classification algorithm (BHC), that identifies multicast network topology based on the hamming distance of the sequences on receipt/loss of probe packets maintained at each pair of nodes. It is proved by analysis and simulation that BHC can infer the topology at a higher accuracy and efficiency than the previous algorithms with a finite number of probe packets. We also propose a new statistical approach to infer network-internal link loss performance based on the inferred topology. The inferred link loss rate is proved to be consistent with the real loss rate as the number of probe packets tends to infinity. Our new approach makes it possible to infer multicast network topology and loss performance simultaneously. We extend our algorithms for both multicast topology and loss performance inference in binary trees to general trees, and present a new method of loss rate-based scheme for general tree topology inference so that the inferred topology can correctly converge to the true topology which was difficult to achieve previously.

TCP-Peachtree: A Multicast Transport Protocol for Satellite IP Networks

In this paper, a reliable multicast transport protocol TCP-Peachtree is proposed for satellite Internet protocol (IP) networks. In addition to the acknowledgment implosion and scalability problems in terrestrial wirelined networks, satellite multicasting has additional problems, i.e., different multicast topology, different type of congestion control problems, and low bandwidth feedback link. In TCP-Peachtree, the modified B+ tree logical hierarchical structure is used to form dynamic multicast groups. Local error recovery and acknowledgment (ACK) aggregations are performed within each subgroup and also via logical subgroups. In order to avoid the overall performance degradation caused by some worst receivers, a local relay scheme is designed. Two new algorithms, jump start and quick recovery, which are based on the usage of a type of low-priority segments called NIL segments, are proposed for congestion control. NIL segments are used to probe the availability of network resources and also for error recovery. The delayed selective acknowledgment (SACK) scheme is adopted to address the bandwidth asymmetry problems and a hold state is developed to address persistent fades. The simulation results show that the congestion control algorithms of TCP-Peachtree outperform the TCP-NewReno when combined with our hierarchical groups and improve the throughput performance during rain fades. It is also shown that TCP-Peachtree achieves fairness and is very highly scalability.

Multicast With Network Coding in Application-Layer Overlay Networks

All of the advantages of application-layer overlay networks arise from two fundamental properties: 1) the network nodes in an overlay network, as opposed to lower-layer network elements such as routers and switches, are end systems and have capabilities far beyond basic operations of storing and forwarding; 2) the overlay topology, residing above a densely connected Internet protocol-layer wide-area network, can be constructed and manipulated to suit one's purposes. We seek to improve end-to-end throughput significantly in application-layer multicast by taking full advantage of these unique characteristics. This objective is achieved with two novel insights. First, we depart from the conventional view that overlay nodes can only replicate and forward data. Rather, as end systems, these overlay nodes also have the full capability of encoding and decoding data at the message level using efficient linear codes. Second, we depart from traditional wisdom that the multicast topology from source to receivers needs to be a tree, and propose a novel and distributed algorithm to construct a two-redundant multicast graph (a directed acyclic graph) as the multicast topology, on which network coding is applied. We design our algorithm such that the costs of link stress and stretch are explicitly considered as constraints and minimized. We extensively evaluate our algorithm by provable analytical and experimental results, which show that the introduction of two-redundant multicast graph and network coding may indeed bring significant benefits, essentially doubling the end-to-end throughput in most cases.

Multicast topology inference from measured end-to-end loss

The use of multicast inference on end-to-end measurement has been proposed as a means to infer network internal characteristics such as packet link loss rate and delay. We propose three types of algorithm that use loss measurements to infer the underlying multicast topology: (i) a grouping estimator that exploits the monotonicity of loss rates with increasing path length; (ii) a maximum-likelihood estimator (MLE); and (iii) a Bayesian estimator. We establish their consistency, compare their complexity and accuracy, and analyze the modes of failure and their asymptotic probabilities.