Multicast Tree Research Articles

Heuristic Initialization Based Modified ACO (HIMACO) Mimicking Ant Safety Features for Multicast Routing and its Parameter Tuning

A multicast tree with a minimum cost is required to improve the quality of service (QoS) constraints. Due to combinatorial issues, conventional approaches are not appropriate for more extensive and dynamic networks. Researchers have applied Swarm Intelligence (SI)-based techniques like Ant Colony Optimization (ACO), Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and Evolutionary-based method like Genetic Algorithm (GA) to deal with the combinatorial problems. ACO is among the best choices for researchers to solve the multicast routing problem in modern communication networks. The novelty of the proposed Heuristic Initialization Based Modified ACO (HIMACO) is the use of safety features that mimics the behaviour of real ants and the use of heuristics-based initialization rather than random initialization.The simulation result shows the superiority of proposed HIMACO routing algorithm in context with runtime and packet loss as compared to other popular swarm and evolutionary based algorithms as well as conventional algorithms. The execution time of HIMACO has decreased by 72%, 65%, 56%, 40% and 35% as compared to Prim's Algorithm, Dijkstra's Algorithm, and conventional GA, PSO and ACO, respectively. The packet loss probability of HIMACO is also reduced by 56%, 54%, 46%, 37% and 33% than Prim's Algorithm, Dijkstra's Algorithm, and conventional GA, PSO and ACO, respectively. Also, we have presented the analysis of the parameters tuning for HIMACO in this paper.

QoS-VNS-CS: QoS constraints Core Selection Algorithm based on Variable Neighborhood Search Algorithm

Within the development of network multimedia technology, more and more real-time multimedia applications arrive with the need to transmit information using multicast communication. Multicast IP routing is an important topic, covering both theoretical and practical interest in different networks layers. In network layer, there are several multicast routing protocols using multicast routing trees different in the literature. However PIM-SM and CBT protocols remains the most used multicast routing protocols; they propose using a shared Core-based Tree CBT. This kind of tree provides efficient management of multicast path in changing group memberships, scalability and performance. The prime problem concerning construction of a shared tree is to determine the best position of the core. QoS-CS’s problem (QoS constraints core Selection) consists in choosing an optimal multicast router in the network as core of the Shared multicast Tree (CBT) within specified QoS constraints associated. The choice of this specific router, called RP in PIM-SM protocol and core in CBT protocol, affects the structure of multicast routing tree, and therefore influences performances of both multicast session and routing scheme. QoS-CS is an NP complete problem need to be solved through a heuristic algorithm, in this paper, we propose a new core Selection algorithm based on Variable Neighborhood Search algorithm and new CMP fitness function. Simulation results show that good performance is achieved in multicast cost, end-to-end delay, tree construction delay and others metrics.

K-Means Clustering-Based Safety System in Large-Scale Industrial Site Using Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks

A large number of workers and heavy equipment are used in most industrial sizes, and the prevention of safety accidents is one of the most important issues. Therefore, although a number of systems have been proposed to prevent accidents, existing studies assume that workers are gathered in some areas. These assumptions are not suitable for large-scale industrial sites in which workers form as a group and work in a large area. In other words, in a large-scale industrial site, existing schemes are unsuitable for the timely notifying of warnings of threats, and excessive energy is consumed. Therefore, we propose a k-means clustering-based safety system for a large-scale industrial site. In the proposed scheme, workers deployed over a large area are divided into an appropriate number of groups, and threat notification is delivered by a multicasting tree toward each cluster. The notification to workers is delivered through local flooding in each cluster. The simulation results show that the system is able to deliver the notification within a valid time, and it is energy efficient compared to the existing scheme.

M-Emu: A Platform for Multicast Emulation

Network layer multicast research is an important field of network research that requires simulators or emulators to support Software-Defined Networking (SDN) as well as to provide a specific structure at the network layer to facilitate packet forwarding, such as a multicast tree. The existing emulation platforms cannot effectively support the emulation of certain key multicast technologies, such as the Grafting Point (GP)-selection method and Rendezvous Point (RP)-selection method, for the following reasons: First, the programmable data plane of the existing emulation platform has many defects, such as the inability to process packet scheduling tasks, the prohibition of dynamic memory allocation and loops with unknown iteration counts, which make it difficult to deploy complex multicast protocols and algorithms. Secondly, at present, no emulation platform integrates network layer multicast emulation functions. As a result, users need to develop the multicast tree construction and maintenance mechanism in advance, which makes experiments laborious. To solve the above problems, based on NS4, we designed a multicast emulation platform, M-Emu. M-Emu presents a Service-Forwarding Architecture, which enables the data plane to deploy arbitrary complex protocols and algorithms. Based on the Service-Forwarding Architecture, M-Emu integrates a Multicast-Emulation Framework, which has a complete multicast tree construction and maintenance mechanism. We explain in detail how the various parts of M-Emu cooperate to complete the multicast emulation with an example and prove that M-Emu is efficient in CPU and memory consumption, etc., through a large number of experiments.

A Dynamic Cache Allocation Mechanism (DCAM) for Reliable Multicast in Information-Centric Networking

As a new network architecture, information-centric networking (ICN) decouples the identifiers and locators of network entities and makes full use of in-network cache technology to improve the content distribution efficiency. For reliable multicast, ICN in-network cache can help reduce the loss recovery delay. However, with the development of applications and services, a multicast tree node often serves multiple reliable multicast groups. How to reasonably allocate cache resources for each multicast group will greatly affect the performance of reliable multicast. In order to improve the overall loss recovery performance of reliable multicast, this paper designs a dynamic cache allocation mechanism (DCAM). DCAM considers the packet loss probability, the node depth of the multicast tree, and the multicast transmission rate of multicast group, and then allocates cache space for multicast group based on the normalized cache quota weight. We also explore the performance of three cache allocation mechanisms (DCAM, AARM, and Equal) combined with four cache strategies (LCE, CAPC, Prob, and ProbCache), respectively. Experimental results show that DCAM can adjust cache allocation results in time according to network changes, and its combinations with various cache strategies outperform other combinations. Moreover, the combination of DCAM and CAPC can achieve optimal performance in loss recovery delay, cache hit ratio, transmission completion time, and overhead.

QoS Constrained Network Coding Technique to Data Transmission Using IoT

The research work presents, constrained network coding technique to ensure the successful data transmission based composite channel cmos technology using dielectric properties. The charge fragmentation and charge splitting are two components of the filtered switch domino (FSD) technique. Further behavior of selected switching is achieved using generator called conditional pulse generator which is employed in Multi Dynamic Node Domino (MDND) technique. Both FSD and MDND technique need wide area compared to existing single node-keeper domino technique. The aim of this research is to minimize dissipation of power and to achieve less consumption of power. The proposed research, works by introducing the method namely Interference and throughput aware Optimized Multicast Routing Protocol (IT-OMRP). The main goal of this proposed research method is to introduce the system which can forward the data packets towards the destination securely and successfully. To achieve the bandwidth and throughput in optimized data transmission, proposed multicast tree is selected by Particle Swarm Optimization which will select the most optimal host node as the branches of multi cast tree. Here node selection is done by considering the objectives residual energy, residual bandwidth and throughput. After node selection multi cast routing is done with the concern of interference to ensure the reliable and successful data transmission. In case of transmission range size is higher than the coverage sense range, successful routing is ensured by selecting secondary host forwarders as a backup which will act as intermediate relay forwarders. The NS2 simulator is used to evaluate research outcome from which it is proved that the proposed technique tends to have increased packet delivery ratio than the existing work.

An Adaptive Hierarchical Hybrid Multicast Based on Information-Centric Networking

Many information-centric services have emerged, such as IPTV and video conferencing. These services put a lot of demands on scalable multicast communication. However, traditional IP multicast has low adoption because of its poor scalability. Therefore, some stateless multicast methods were proposed, which encapsulate the destination’s information into the packet header without requiring routers to maintain the multicast forwarding state. However, stateless multicast also faces some problems, such as ingress router overload, high forwarding overhead, packet redundancy, etc. In addition, most multicast methods cannot optimize the multicast tree because the multicast flow is simply forwarded along the shortest path tree from the source to receivers. This paper proposes an Adaptive Hierarchical Hybrid Multicast (AHHM) based on Information-Centric Networking. To balance the forwarding states and forwarding overhead, AHHM is designed as a two-layer structure, in which the upper layer establishes a stateful main tree and the lower layer establishes several stateless sub trees. The router on the main tree is defined as the multicast join node (MJN), and AHHM uses the Name Resolution System to maintain the mapping between each multicast group name and corresponding MJNs. To optimize the multicast transmission path, we designed the minimum cost selection strategy for users to select the appropriate MJN to join. Simulation results show that compared with Source-Specific Multicast (SSM) and Bit Index Explicit Replication (BIER), AHHM can not only reduce the multicast forwarding states but also reduce the control overhead and link load.

Toward Concurrent Video Multicast Orchestration for Caching-Assisted Mobile Networks

Multicasting does not work well for video applications such as video on demand, where individual users request video content at discrete and unpredictable moments. In this paper, we study a concurrent video multicast orchestration solution for the caching-assisted and centrally controlled mobile networks. The proposed solution strives to obtain rapid video prefetch and effective traffic reduction. By rapid video prefetch, user devices can cache required contents in advance, which can effectively improve the streaming fluency in unsteady wireless environments, especially the highly mobile vehicular environment. We introduce a maximum-rate concurrent multicast (MRCM) problem whose solution is intended to maximize the total video delivery rate by a concurrent multicast manner, and prove that the MRCM problem is NP-hard. Then, we propose a dynamic concurrent multicast tree construction algorithm and a global concurrent multicast tree optimization algorithm to approximately solve the MRCM problem in polynomial time. We also introduce a cache competition mechanism that strives to maximize the total cache hit rate when the cache space is insufficient. Performance evaluations show that compared with the existing cache-assisted multicast delivery solutions, the proposed solution significantly reduces the video delivery duration and the traffic stress of backhaul links.

Multicast tree construction algorithm for dynamic traffic on software defined networks

Dynamic traffic of multicast communication in the Software Defined Network environment focused less though it is more natural and practical. In multicast communication, the traffic is dynamic due to the dynamic group memberships (i.e., participants join and leave the group anytime), which are not explored much in the previous research works. The multicast in dynamic traffic requires a method to handle dynamic group membership and minimum tree alteration for every join and leave of participants from the multicast group. This paper proposes a multicast tree construction algorithm, which considers receiving devices and network capability as base parameters to construct the multicast path. The proposed routing method uses Dijkstra’s Shortest Path algorithm for initial tree formation, identifies a multicast path, and processes the Shortest Path Tree to reduce the overall hop count and path cost. The multicast tree generated by the proposed enables the dynamic join and leaves of participating devices with reduced tree alteration using more common paths to reach the devices. The implementation and results show that the proposed method works efficiently in resource utilization with a reduced hop count and quality for multicast communication in static and dynamic scenarios. Also, the results demonstrate that the proposed method generates a stable common path for multicast communication.

Softwarized IP Multicast in the Cloud

In this article, we revisit the problem of how to provide “native” IP multicast support to enterprise distributed applications in today's clouds, without touching either the application implementation or the underlying network hardware. We propose SDM, Software-Defined IP Multicast, to explore the idea of performing Multicast-to-Unicast (M2U) and Unicast-to-Multicast (U2M) translations at the virtualized network edge. At the data plane, with novel architecture designs, SDM achieves efficient M2U and U2M translations by only using Open vSwitch (OVS), an OpenFlow-compatible open-source software switch widely deployed in modern clouds. At the control plane, SDM dynamically adopts multicast trees respecting the join and leave of receivers with flexible cost-based algorithms. SDM is very easy to deploy and use, as its required features are already supported by off-the-shelf OVS software (version 2 2.3) and the OpenFlow protocol (version 2 1.1). Performance evaluations of its control-plane algorithms also imply that SDM is flexible to construct through-put and latency/height optimized multicast trees respecting task requirements.

Multi Objective Concerned Network Coding Technique for Optimal Data Transmission

The Internet of Things (IoT) seems to developed in the real-world scenario due to increased utilization of sensor driven technologies. There are various research works has been proposed earlier for the network coding to ensure the reliable data transmission. However, existing research techniques doesn’t focus on the reliable route path selection which might affect the rate of data transmission. These issues are focused in the proposed research method by introducing the method namely Multi-Objective concerned Network Coding Technique (MO-NCT). In this work initially multicast tree construction is performed using Particle Swarm Optimization method. The main goal of this research work is ensuring the reliable and successful data transmission. Here the optimal network nodes will be chosen for constructing the multi cast tree. The multiple objectives considered in this work for the selection of the nodes are residual energy, remaining bandwidth level and throughput of nodes. To ensure the reliable data transmission even with the presence of larger coverage area, this work attempted to select the backup forwarder nodes which will act as intermediate hop relay nodes. The overall analysis of the research work is done in the NS2 simulation environment from which it is proved that the proposed method MO-MRP tends to achieve the optimal data transmission rate.

A Two-Layered Shared Tree Multicast Routing Algorithm for Software Defined Hybrid Satellite-Terrestrial Communication Networks

Dynamic routing and congestion control are two major problems in software-defined hybrid satellite-terrestrial multicast networks research. Due to terrestrial users being allowed to join or leave the multicast group at any time and the differences between the satellite and the terrestrial networks, many multicast routing algorithms reroute rapidly and thus increase the rerouting overheads. Meanwhile, the congestion ratio is increased by some hot nodes of satellite-terrestrial link transmission paths. This paper focuses on rerouting overheads and congestion problems in satellite-terrestrial multicast networks. We present a satellite-terrestrial network architecture with the Software-Defined Networking (SDN) features to offer dynamic multicast services for terrestrial users. A Two-Layered Shared Tree Multicast (TSTM) routing algorithm is proposed to achieve efficient dynamic multicast group management, address the trade-off between bandwidth consumption and rerouting overheads. The algorithm also implements congestion control by using a load factor to reflect on the global network bandwidth usage in routing calculations. This algorithm balances the rerouting frequencies of satellite and terrestrial networks to decrease the rerouting overheads and also reduces the network congestion ratio. The simulation shows TSTM decreases rerouting cost, user time delay, and node congestion ratio compared with the locality-aware multicast approach (LAMA).

Efficient Block Propagation in Wireless Blockchain Networks and Its Application in Bitcoin

As the supporting architecture of cryptocurrencies, blockchain is also showing its promising potential to be applied to mobile devices. Being WiFi supported, mobile devices nowadays are able to perform ad-hoc local communications in multi-hop manners, thus can potentially extend cryptocurrency service into areas without stable Internet connection. However, traditional blockchain architecture suffers from the intolerably high block propagation latency and communication cost which will be even trickier if adopted in wireless multi-hop networks (WMNs). This paper aims to reduce this latency and cost by leveraging node weights to distinguish the feedback speed of different nodes and constructing a low-length multicast tree to select a subset of nodes with higher feedback speed to participate in the block verification. Thus, block propagation is depicted by the minimum length multicast tree, intrinsically the Steiner Tree Problem. The primary challenge lies in that the WMNs only allow local communication and the distributed consensus protocol of the blockchain makes a predetermination of receiver nodes impossible. We design our algorithm via a ``toward source'' Steiner tree approach in favor of the distributed environment. Tree construction proceeds by progressively enlarging the searching areas until the accumulated weight of receiver nodes reaches a threshold. Our algorithm provably returns a tree length fairly close to that of the optimal Steiner tree with latency <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$O(\sqrt{n\log n})$</tex-math></inline-formula> (where <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$n$</tex-math></inline-formula> represents the number of nodes in the network), the best so far. Furthermore, our algorithm is empirically validated to provide instructive insights for efficient block propagation with applications in Bitcoin network.

A Multicast Routing Scheme for the Internet: Simulation and Experimentation in Large-Scale Networks

With the globalisation of the multimedia entertainment industry and the popularity of streaming and content services, multicast routing is (re-)gaining interest as a bandwidth saving technique. In the 1990’s, multicast routing received a great deal of attention from the research community; nevertheless, its main problems still remain mostly unaddressed and do not reach the acceptance level required for its wide deployment. Among other reasons, the scaling limitation and the relative complexity of the standard multicast protocol architecture can be attributed to the conventional approach of overlaying the multicast routing on top of the unicast routing topology. In this paper, we present the Greedy Compact Multicast Routing (GCMR) scheme. GMCR is characterised by its scalable architecture and independence from any addressing and unicast routing schemes; more specifically, the local knowledge of the cost to direct neighbour nodes is enough for the GCMR scheme to properly operate. The branches of the multicast tree are constructed directly by the joining destination nodes which acquire the routing information needed to reach the multicast source by means of an incremental two-stage search process. In this paper we present the details of GCMR and evaluate its performance in terms of multicast tree size (i.e., the stretch), the memory space consumption, the communication cost, and the transmission cost. The comparative performance analysis is performed against one reference algorithm and two well-known protocol standards. Both simulation and emulation results show that GCMR achieves the expected performance objectives and provide the guidelines for further improvements.

A two-stage approach for multicast-oriented virtual network function placement

Network function virtualization (NFV) is an emerging network paradigm that decouples softwarized network functions from proprietary hardware. Nowadays, resource allocation has become one of the hot topics in the NFV domain. In this paper, we formulate a service function chain (SFC) mapping problem in the context of multicast, which is also referred to as the multicast-oriented virtual network function placement (MVNFP) problem. The objective function considers end-to-end delay as well as compute resource consumption, with bandwidth requirements met. A two-stage approach is proposed to address this problem. In the first stage, Dijkstra’s algorithm is adopted to construct a multicast tree. In the second stage, a novel estimation of distribution algorithm (nEDA) is developed to map a given SFC over the multicast tree. Simulation results show that the proposed two-stage approach outperforms a number of state-of-the-art evolutionary, approximation, and heuristic algorithms, in terms of the solution quality.

DTMR: An adaptive Distributed Tree-based Multicast Routing protocol for vehicular networks

The modern driver-assistance and autonomous technologies in vehicles increase the ease of driving vehicles. The increased vehicle usage increases the requirement of efficient group communication between the vehicles to support the safety as well as the non-safety applications in Vehicular Ad-hoc NETworks (VANET). In VANET, multicast communication is mostly preferred for the effective utilization of computational resources and the attainment of the Quality of Service (QoS). To implement an efficient multicast communication, we need to build and retain a multicast tree. Due to the high mobility and rapid topology changes, the formation and maintenance of a multicast tree are challenging in VANET. Existing multicast communication techniques are either centralized or location-based flooding and suffer from tree reconfiguration overhead. In this paper, a novel Distributed Tree-based Multicast Routing (DTMR) algorithm is proposed. During the link failure, the connection is switched to a predetermined and highly stable guardian node. Further, the tree fragmentation and the rejoining delay is reduced in VANET using the proposed algorithm, DTMR. From the simulation results, it is evident that the DTMR achieves a significant performance improvement against the existing multicast techniques such as Distributed Time-limited Reliable Broadcast Incremental Power Strategy (DTRBIP) and Energy Efficient Multicast routing protocol based on Software Defined Networks and Fog computing for Vehicular networks (EEMSFV) in terms of delay, packet loss ratio, scalability, and reliability. In terms of end-to-end delay, packet loss rate, and reliability, the DTMR outperforms the existing DTRBIP and EEMSFV protocols. DTMR achieves 94--96% reliability in highway scenarios and 96--99% reliability in urban environments. Further, as a proof of concept, the proposed, DTMR is implemented and analyzed in real-time. It is found that the real-time experimental results are on par with the simulation results. Hence, the proposed DTMR achieves network stability and reliability in real-time.

Multiobjective Multicast DSR Algorithm for Routing in Mobile Networks with Cost, Delay, and Hop Count

Tremendous evaluation of wireless mobile communication needs more efficient algorithms for communication systems. The use of conventional single-objective optimization algorithms may be unsuitable for real applications, because they act to the detriment of the rest of the performance parameters like lifetime network, delay, cost, and hop count; for this reason, multiobjective is needed. This paper presents performance evaluation and compares between the Multicast MDSR and MAODV with MACO. The proposed MDSR is concerned with change of the route discovery phase, where the route selection is based on the shortest path of route reply packets on the route with calculating the number of hop counts. Also, this article compares our MDSR modification with the evaluation algorithm based on Ant Colony Optimization (ACO), which finds the best path and multicast tree optimizes total weight (cost, delay, and hop count) of the multicast tree using multiobjective. Experimental results proved that the proposed MDSR algorithm is more efficient than MAODV and MACO in the total weight (cost, delay, and hop count), respectively. Moreover, the MACO outperforms MAODV for multicast routing problem.

Seamless Multicast : an SDN-based architecture for continuous audiovisual transport

For audiovisual network operators, end-users satisfaction is a major issue. This is the case for TDF who operates a nationwide network in France whose main purpose is to carry Digital Terrestrial Television streams. Such audiovisual content is forwarded through multicast real-time streams which require continuity of service. Therefore, the main goal of this work is to define a new architecture to prevent impact during network healing time. The proposed architecture aims to use a pair of redundant multicast trees, and ensure their seamless resiliency. This architecture called “Seamless Multicast” takes advantage of the network-end equipment’s ability to receive and combine two identical streams, complete or not. The main contribution of this paper is the development and evaluation of an algorithm for the computation of a pair of multicast trees and the associated hitless deployment scheme. Implementation requires an Software-Defined Networking architecture, in which performance knowledge and bandwidth management are centralized in a controller. A proof of concept controller has been used for validation of the architecture’s global behaviour using a virtualized environment in multiple scenarios.

Interference-Aware NFV-Enabled Multicast Service in Resource-Constrained Wireless Mesh Networks

Network Function Virtualization is a key technology that enables network operators to provide diverse communication services flexibly over a common infrastructure, resulting in a significantly reduced cost. This paper addresses the problem of optimal network function virtualization for providing multicast services in wireless mesh networks with minimal total cost. This problem is modeled in two different ways: Link-based Model (LBM) and Path-based Model (PBM). In both models, we formulate the problem as an integer linear program to find the best hosts for virtual network functions and to steer traffic across them by considering wireless interference and resource budgets. Furthermore, we propose a heuristic solution based on the decomposition of the problem into two smaller sub-problems that can be solved sequentially in two phases. In the first phase, a multicast tree for forwarding traffic is constructed, while in the second phase, the required network functions are instantiated in appropriately chosen nodes. Simulation results are presented to compare the performance and complexity of the exact solutions of link-based and path-based approaches and the proposed heuristic approach. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed path-based model and the heuristic algorithm.

A secure multicast routing algorithm Based on distributed PCE in multi-domain optical networks

Aiming at the calculation of secure multicast routing in multi-domain optical network, a new secure multicast routing algorithm based on distributed path calculation element was proposed. Firstly, the distributed PCE multicast routing model was constructed, and the intra-domain cost, inter-domain cost, maximum available wavelength and related constraints were defined. Secondly, the pheromone update strategy of ant colony algorithm with ant queen was locally simplified and modified to make it suitable for the distributed PCE architecture of multi-domain optical network. At the same time, by optimizing the trust value calculation method in the lightweight cross domain trust model, the algorithm can be applied to the calculation of trust value of multicast routing in multi domain optical networks. Finally, the specific implementation steps of the algorithm were given. The analysis and experimental results show that the algorithm can not only ensure the security of cross domain multicast routing, but also prevent the malicious nodes from destroying. Compared with the typical multicast routing algorithm, it has better performance in multicast tree cost and blocking rate in malicious node environment.