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Multicast Routing Model to Minimize Number of Flow Entries in Software-Defined Network

Seiki KOTACHI, Takehiro SATO, Ryoichi SHINKUMA, Eiji OKI

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Summary :

The Software-defined network (SDN) uses a centralized SDN controller to store flow entries in the flow table of each SDN switch; the entries in the switch control packet flows. When a multicast service is provided in an SDN, the SDN controller stores a multicast entry dedicated for a multicast group in each SDN switch. Due to the limited capacity of each flow table, the number of flow entries required to set up a multicast tree must be suppressed. A conventional multicast routing scheme suppresses the number of multicast entries in one multicast tree by replacing some of them with unicast entries. However, since the conventional scheme individually determines a multicast tree for each request, unicast entries dedicated to the same receiver are distributed to various SDN switches if there are multiple multicast service requests. Therefore, further reduction in the number of flow entries is still possible. In this paper, we propose a multicast routing model for multiple multicast requests that minimizes the number of flow entries. This model determines multiple multicast trees simultaneously so that a unicast entry dedicated to the same receiver and stored in the same SDN switch is shared by multicast trees. We formulate the proposed model as an integer linear programming (ILP) problem. In addition, we develop a heuristic algorithm which can be used when the ILP problem cannot be solved in practical time. Numerical results show that the proposed model reduces the required number of flow entries compared to two benchmark models; the maximum reduction ratio is 49.3% when the number of multicast requests is 40.

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Communications Vol.E104-B No.5 pp.507-518
Publication Date
2021/05/01
Publicized
2020/11/13
Online ISSN
1745-1345
DOI
10.1587/transcom.2020EBP3064
Type of Manuscript
PAPER
Category
Network

Authors

Seiki KOTACHI
  Kyoto University
Takehiro SATO
  Kyoto University
Ryoichi SHINKUMA
  Kyoto University
Eiji OKI
  Kyoto University

Keyword