Software Defined Unicast/Multicast Jointed Routing for Real-Time Data Distribution

The explosive increasing of high bandwidth-consumption traffic puts great pressure on the Internet. Many popular applications springing up work in a manner of one-to-many or many-to-many communication, such as TikTok, Instagram, Tencent conference, and numbers of interactive games. Due to the scalability and applicability problems, existing multicast schemes, e.g. IP multicast, are not widely implemented. Instead, most of those traffic is transmitted through the Internet in unicast, which results in vast redundant traffic in backbone networks. In this paper, we propose a unicast/multicast jointed routing mechanism in software defined networks, SDUM. We devote to achieve unicast data distribution following a dynamic multicast tree, which is managed by centralized control and application plane. Other than OpenFlow protocol, this mechanism doesn’t require any specific multicast protocols or software. The network can be a virtualized network with distributed OpenFlow devices interconnected by legacy routers. The evaluation results confirm the efficiency of the proposal in the number of control messages, signaling overhead, occupation of flow table entries, and qualitative comparison.