Approximate bounds and expressions for the link utilization of shortest-path multicast network traffic

Multicast network traffic is information with one source node, but many destination nodes. Rather than setting up individual connections between the source node and each destination node, or broadcasting the information to the entire network, multicasting efficiently exploits link capacity by allowing the source node to transmit a small number of copies of the information to mutually-exclusive groups of destination nodes. Multicasting is an important topic in the fields of networking (video and audio conferencing, video on demand, local-area network interconnection) and computer architecture (cache coherency, multiprocessor message passing). In this paper, we derive approximate expressions for the minimum cost (in terms of link utilization) of shortest-path multicast traffic in arbitrary tree networks. Our results provide a theoretical best-case scenario for link utilization of multicast distribution in tree topologies overlaid onto arbitrary graphs. In real networks such as the Internet MBONE, multicast distribution paths are often tree-like, but contain some cycles for purposes of fault tolerance. We find that even for richly-connected graphs such as the shufflenet and the hypercube, our expression provides a good prediction of the cost (in terms of link utilization) of multicast communication. Thus, this theoretical result has two applications: (1) a lower bound on the link capacity required for multicasting in random tree topologies, and (2) an approximation of the cost of multicasting in regular LAN and MAN topologies.     

Protecting multicast services in optical internet backbones

Many applications in the future Internet will use the multicasting service mode. Since many of these applications will generate large amounts of traffic, and since users expect a high level of service availability, it is important to provision multicasting sessions in the future Internet while also providing protection for multicast sessions against network component failures. In this paper we address the multicast survivability problem of using minimum resources to provision a multicast session and its protection paths (trees) against any single-link failure. We propose a new, and a resource efficient, protection scheme, namely, Segment-based Protection Tree (SPT). In SPT scheme, a given multicast session is first provisioned as a primary multicast tree, and then each segment on the primary tree is protected by a multicast tree instead of a path, as in most existing approaches. We also analyze the recovery performance of SPT and design a reconfiguration calculation algorithm to compute the average number of reconfigurations upon any link failure. By extending SPT to address dynamic traffic scenarios, we also propose two heuristic algorithms, Cost-based SPT (CB_SPT) and Wavelength-based SPT (WB_SPT). We study the performance of the SPT scheme in different traffic scenarios. The numerical results show that SPT outperforms the best existing approaches, optimal path-pair-based shared disjoint paths (OPP_SDPs). SPT uses less than 10% extra resources to provision a survivable multicast session over the optimal solution and up to 4% lower than existing approaches under various traffic scenarios and has an average number of reconfigurations 10–86% less than the best cost efficient approach. Moreover, in dynamic traffic cases, both CB_SPT and WB_SPT achieves overall blocking probability with 20% lower than OPP_SDP in most network scenarios.     

Delay-Constrained,Low-Cost Multicast Routing in Multimedia Networks

Support for multimedia applications is a major objective of future high speed networks. Multimedia applications are usually resource intensive, have stringent quality of service (QoS) requirements, and in many cases involve large multicast groups. Multicasting enables these applications to scale to a large number of users without overloading the network and server resources. This paper focuses on developing low-cost, delay-bounded multicast trees to support the QoS requirements of multimedia applications. The approach taken in the development of the multicast trees is to decouple the cost optimization from bounding the delay by first building a low-cost tree and then handling any delay violations that may occur in the tree. Three new heuristics are proposed. The first two heuristics, delay-constrained low-cost inexpensive multicasting (SLIM) and SLIM+, use the least-cost path between the multicast nodes to incrementally build a multicast tree that satisfies the delay requirements of the multicast nodes. Their complexity is O(n³), where n is the number of nodes in the network. The third heuristic, K-SLIM, builds a set of k shortest paths and uses these paths in an attempt to further reduce the cost of the multicast tree without violating the delay requirements of the multicast nodes. Its time complexity is O(kn³ log(n)), where k, a user-defined parameter, denotes the number of shortest paths to be considered. Our simulation results show that K-SLIM on average outperforms other well-known heuristics. The results also show that SLIM+ produces low-cost, delay-bounded trees with an average cost close to the average cost of the trees produced by K-SLIM but with much lower processing overhead.     

A video conferencing system based on SDN-enabled SVC multicast

Current typical video conferencing connection is bridged by a multipoint control unit (MCU), which may cause large delay and communication bottleneck for the whole system. With the development of network technology, a video conferencing system can be implemented based on software-defined networking (SDN), which makes the service controllable and improves the scalability and flexibility. Additionally, a video encoding method called scalable video coding (SVC) can also help. In this paper, we propose a video conferencing architecture based on SDN-enabled SVC multicasting, which discards the traditional Internet group management protocol (IGMP) and MCU. The system implements SVC multicast streaming to satisfy different device capabilities of various conference terminals. The SDN controller is responsible for dynamically managing and controlling the layers of a video stream when a conference member faces network congestion. Also, a conference manager is designed to facilitate the management of the conference members. Experimental results show that our system can not only provide a flexible and controllable video delivery, but also reduce the network usage while guaranteeing the quality of service (QoS) of video conferencing.     

Comparison of recovery schemes to maximize restorable throughput in multicast networks

Multicast networks have many applications especially in real-time content delivery systems. For high-quality services, users do not expect to witness any interruption; thus, network link failure has to be handled gracefully. In unicast networks there are many approaches for dealing with link failures using backup paths. Recently, Cohen and Nakibly categorized these methods, provided linear programming formulations for optimizing network throughput under the assumption that the paths are splitable, and compared them experimentally. In this work, we take their approach and apply to the multicast failure recovery problem. We propose backup bandwidth allocation algorithms based on linear programs to maximize the throughput, and perform an experimental study on the performance of recovery schemes. We study many recovery schemes in multicast networks and propose a new recovery scheme that performs better than all other recovery scheme except the one that recomputed the whole multicast tree from scratch for each link failure.     

An efficient and easily deployable QoS-based routing scheme for online Internet multicasting

With the advent of multimedia applications, the support of online multicasting with quality of service guarantees has gained considerable attention in the field of communication networks and distributed systems. Online multicasting requires the support of online join and leave operations. In this paper, a new Simple and Efficient Low-cost Delay-bounded Online Multicasting (SELDOM) heuristic is proposed. SELDOM is particularly tailored to networks in which group membership changes frequently. SELDOM supports two modes of operations: non-rearrangeable and rearrangeable. The scheme handles join requests dynamically by determining the least-cost path which satisfies the required delay-bounds to which the new group member is to be attached. To handle a leave request, the scheme seeks to limit the number of rearrangements required in order to reduce the disturbance such a request may cause to current group members. The worst case time complexity of SELDOM is O(n²). An important research contribution of this work shows that if any non-rearrangeable multicast heuristic uses a path other than the least-delay path to add a node to the multicast tree, then the resulting multicast tree can have cycles or nodes with two incoming paths. A simulation-based comparison between non-rearrangeable and rearrangeable online multicast trees is also presented.     

Resource Allocation for Reliable Communication Between Controllers and Switches in SDN

In software-defined networking (SDN), the communication between controllers and switches is very important, for switch can only work by relying on flow tables received from its controller. Therefore, how to ensure the reliability of the communication between controllers and switches is a key problem in SDN. In this paper, we study this problem from two aspects: the controller placement and the resource backup aspect. Firstly, in order to implement the reliable communication and meet the required propagation delay between controllers and switches, a min-cover based controller placement approach is proposed. Then, in order to protect both controllers and control paths from regional failure, a backup method based on an exponential decay failure model is proposed, which considers the regional influence and the survivability of backup controllers and control paths. Simulations show that our controller placement approach can meet the reliability and delay requirement with appropriate controller allocation scheme, and our backup method can improve the survivability of backup controllers and control paths while ensuring the performance of control network.     

HEURISTIC ALGORITHMS FOR SURVIVABLE P2P MULTICASTING

The growing volume of Internet traffic, increasing popularity of streaming services, and limited scalability of existing network techniques trigger the need to develop new delivery solutions based on a multicasting approach. Multicasting—defined as a one-to-many delivery technique—enables effective distribution of many kinds of content to end users. In this article we focus on peer-to-peer (P2P) multicasting, which combines concepts of P2P systems and multicasting solutions; in other words, the multicast tree is constructed using end hosts (peers). Because P2P multicasting can be applied to deliver content with high reliability requirements, we introduce to P2P multicasting additional survivability constraints that guarantee delivery of content in the case of network failures. We formulate a mixed-integer programming (MIP) optimization problem of survivable P2P multicasting. Because the problem is nondeterministic polynomial time (NP)-hard and exact methods such as branch-and-cut can be applied for only a relatively small problem instance, we propose two heuristic algorithms based on evolutionary approach and Tabu Search methods. Extensive computational experiments show that both heuristic algorithms provide results close to optimal—the average gap to optimal results is 0.26% and 5.15% in the case of evolutionary and Tabu Search methods, respectively.     

多媒体通信中带度约束的多播路由算法

随着多媒体业务的发展,多播技术应用日益广泛,多播路由是要寻找连接源节点和一组目的节点的一棵多播树,这个问题在数学上归结为Steiner树问题,它是一个NPC问题。在实际网络中,网络节点具备不同的多播能力,有些节点不支持多播,有些节点支持多播,但为了保证网络速度和节点负载平衡,支持多播的节点要限制其复制信息的数量,即节点的多播能力受限。在这种情况下,寻找多播树变得更加困难,该文用节点的约束来表示敏个节点具备的多播能力,节点多播能力受限情况下的多播路由问题被称为带度约束的多播路由问题,其仍是一个NPC问题。该文提出了一种求解带度的约束多播路由问题的双层遗传算法。算法的基本思想是最优多播树应是一棵满足度约束的最小生成树,因此问题的关键在于如何找到包括在最优生成树中的Steiner节点。遗传算法 采用二进制编码方式,内层算法用于求解满足度约束的最小生成树;外层算法进行全局搜索。该文将算法在稀疏图上进行实验,为了更好地模拟真实网络,稀疏图中每个节点具有不同的多播能力,并且多播目的节点数目相比于网络节点数要小。实验对算法进行了三方面比较：（1）解的质量;（2）计算时间;（3）算法的收敛性。实验结果表明,文中提出的遗传算法能够找到费用较小的多播树,但是当网络规模增大时,算法的求解时间也较长。     

Packet loss probability for DiffServ over IP and MPLS reliable homogeneous multicast networks

Multicasting has become increasingly important with the emergence of Internet-based applications such as IP telephony, audio/video conferencing, distributed databases and software upgrading. IP multicasting is an efficient way to distribute information from a single source to multiple destinations at different locations. In practice IP is considered as a layer 3 protocol. Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) replaces the IP forwarding by a simple label lookup. MPLS combines the flexibility of layer 3 routing and layer 2 switching.In order to provide QoS in group communications for real time applications such as video conferencing, reliable multicasting is used. Miscellaneous efforts have been undertaken to provide reliability on top of IP multicast. Two error control strategies have been popular in practice. These are the FEC (Forward Error Correction) strategy, which uses error correction alone, and the ARQ (Automatic Repeat Request) strategy, which uses error detection, combined with retransmission of data.In this paper, we present a new fair share policy (FSP) that utilizes Differentiated Services to solve the problems of QoS and congestion control when reliable ARQ multicast is used. The results should provide insight into the comparisons of the residual packet loss probability between IP multicast in MPLS networks using FSP and plain IP multicasting using the same policy when DiffServ are adopted and when reliable ARQ multicast is considered.     

Traffic distribution for end-to-end QoS routing with multicast multichannel services

With the development of multimedia group applications and multicasting demands, the construction of multicast routing tree satisfying Quality of Service (QoS) is more important. A multicast tree, which is constructed by existing multicast algorithms, suffers three major weaknesses: (1) it cannot be constructed by multichannel routing, transmitting a message using all available links, thus the data traffic cannot be preferably distributed; (2) it does not formulate duplication capacity; consequently, duplication capacity in each node cannot be optimally distributed; (3) it cannot change the number of links and nodes used optimally. In fact, it cannot employ and cover unused backup multichannel paths optimally. To overcome these weaknesses, this paper presents a polynomial time algorithm for distributed optimal multicast routing and Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees in networks with multichannel paths which is called Distributed Optimal Multicast Multichannel Routing Algorithm (DOMMR). The aim of this algorithm is: (1) to minimize End-to-End delay across the multichannel paths, (2) to minimize consumption of bandwidth by using all available links, and (3) to maximize data rate by formulating network resources. DOMMR is based on the Linear Programming Formulation (LPF) and presents an iterative optimal solution to obtain the best distributed routes for traffic demands between all edge nodes. Computational experiments and numerical simulation results will show that the proposed algorithm is more efficient than the existing methods. The simulation results are obtained by applying network simulation tools such as QSB, OpNet and MATLB to some samples of network. We then introduce a generalized problem, called the delay-constrained multicast multichannel routing problem, and show that this generalized problem can be solved in polynomial time.     

Scheduling support for multicasting sessions in broadband communication networks

Multimedia applications require support from the underlying broadband network at the end-to-end communication level. Multicasting is an important paradigm of end-to-end communication. The root node of a multicasting session is responsible for controlling the session including monitoring, maintenance, and the implementation of the multicasting protocol. The job that controls the multicasting session executes as a group of tasks at the root node of a multicasting tree. The scheduling scheme at the root node should give support to a multicasting session by improving the completion time of the jobs controlling the multicasting session, hence increasing throughput and the probability of admitting new multicast sessions into the system. In this paper, we model the tasks that carry out the multicasting session monitoring and maintenance as a fork-join job executing on a multiprocessor system. We assume that an executing task blocks for device I/O as a part of the activities associated with sending and receiving data packets. We develop two analytic models for scheduling a session control job on a multiprocessor system. The first model allows incoming job tasks to multiplex processors with existing tasks of another multicasting session, while the other model schedules a task of the incoming job to an idle processor. We assume that the overhead of rescheduling a task to another processor is large. We compare the performance of both models and show the range of conditions under which a model outperforms the other. We point out how the results can be used in the design of an adaptive scheduler that uses both models to improve throughput and consequently the probability of admitting new multicast sessions.     

Fault-tolerant multicasting in hypercubes using local safety information

A fully unsafe hypercube according to the global safety can be split into a unique set of maximal safe subcubes. Multicasting in a maximal safe subcube can be completed reliably based on information related to the maximal safe subcube. A time-optimal multicasting exists if (1) the multicast source is locally safe in the minimum subcube that contains the source and destinations (called a multicast subcube), or (2) the spanning subcube between each destination and the source is safe. We show a sufficient condition for the existence of a multicasting is: the multicast subcube is safe or the spanning subcube between the source and each destination is either safe or is contained in a safe subcube. Methods are presented to set up a partial multicast tree when the above sufficient conditions fail. It is shown that effectiveness of the algorithm can be improved drastically using the partial multicast tree setup technique. Extensive simulation results are also presented.     

Multicast protection scheme in survivable WDM optical networks

The protection design is a key issue in survivable wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) optical networks. Most researches focused on protecting unicast traffic against the failure of a single network component such as a link or a node. In this paper, we investigate the protection scheme for multicast traffic in meshed WDM optical networks under dual-link failure consideration, and propose a novel protection algorithm called shared segment protection with reprovisioning (SSPR). Through dynamically adjusting link-cost according to the current network state, SSPR establishes a primary light-tree and corresponding link-disjoint backup segments for each multicast connection request. A backup segment can efficiently share wavelength capacity of its working tree or the common resource of other backup segments. Capacity reprovisioning establishes new segments for the vulnerable connections after a link failure and tolerates following link failures. The simulation results show that SSPR not only can make good use of wavelength resources and protect multicast sessions against any single-link failure, but also can greatly improve the traffic restorability in the event of dual-link breakdown.     

Fast reroute from single link and single node failures for IP multicast

The rise in multicast implementations has seen with it an increased support for fast failure recovery from link and node failures. Most recovery mechanisms augment additional services to existing protocols causing excessive overhead, and these modifications are predominantly protocol-specific. In this paper, we develop a multicast failure recovery mechanism that constructs protocol independent fast reroute paths to recover from single link and single node failures. We observe that single link failure recovery in multicast networks is similar to recovering unicast traffic, and we use existing unicast recovery mechanisms for multicast traffic. We construct multicast protection trees that provide instantaneous failure recovery from single node failures. For a given node x, the multicast protection tree spans all its neighbors and does not include itself. Thus, when the node fails, the neighbors of the node are connected through the multicast protection tree instead of node x, and forward the traffic over the multicast protection tree for the duration of failure recovery. The multicast protection trees are constructed a priori, without the knowledge of the multicast traffic in the network. Based on simulations on three realistic network topologies, we observe that the multicast protection trees increase the routing table size only by 38% on average and the path length between any source–destination pair by 13% on average.     

一种非完全组播网络中的算法可选组播框架

提出了一种新型实用的算法可选组播框架-FMPN（Flexible Multicasting on Partial-multicast Networks），该框架能够在非完全组播网络中实现组播功能，并且可以根据不同的业务和数据类型采用算法可选的组播机制，以达到系统整体最优的组播传输性能．FMPN有三个主要的特点：（1）算法可选组播机制，根据不同的应用需求来灵活地选择组播算法．并且通过IP隧道使得在路由器不支持的情况下也可以使用组播．（2）数据分类，通过对应用类型与数据的分析来调用合适的组播算法．（3）分层传输为可伸缩性码流提供各自独立的组播信道．实验表明，FMPN多媒体传输的系统整体性能高于当前常用的反向路径组播（RPM）、生成树（SpT）等组播算法，特别适合于实时多媒体应用．     

LVMSR: an efficient algorithm to multicast layered video

Layered video is a video-compression technique to encode video data in multiple layers. It typically consists of a base layer and some additional layers that provide enhanced video quality. The multicasting operation of layered video consists of many receivers dynamically joining and leaving different multicast sessions of different layers depending on their network condition. A layered video multicasting system needs to satisfy: (i) bounded end-to-end delay from the video source to each receiver; (ii) minimum total cost; and (iii) minimum delay jitter between the various video streams received by each receiver. The problem of computing such data distribution paths is NP-complete. This paper presents a new heuristic algorithm, called layered video multicast super-tree routing algorithm, with O(Rn²) time complexity and O(R²) message complexity, where n is the number of nodes in the network and R is the receiver group size. Our investigation shows that the multicast data paths computed by our algorithm can always satisfy the delay constraint with reasonably low total cost.     

Seamless handover between unicast and multicast multimedia streams

With the deployment of heterogeneous networks, mobile users are expecting ubiquitous connectivity when using applications. For bandwidth-intensive applications such as Interact Protocol Television （IPTV）, multimedia contents are typical- ly transmitted using a multicast delivery method due to its bandwidth efficiency. However, not all networks support multicasting. Multicasting alone could lead to service disruption when the users move from a multicast-capable network to a non-multicast network. In this paper, we propose a handover scheme called application layer seamless switching （ALSS） to provide smooth real-time multimedia delivery across unicast and multicast networks. ALSS adopts a soft handover to achieve seamless playback during the handover period. A real-time streaming testbed is implemented to investigate the overall handover performance, espe- cially the overlapping period where both network interfaces are receiving audio and video packets. Both the quality of service （QoS） and objective-mapped quality of experience （QoE） metrics are measured. Experimental results show that the overlapping period takes a minimum of 56 and 4 ms for multicast-to-unicast （M2U） and unicast-to-multicast （U2M） handover, respectively. The measured peak signal-to-noise ratio （PSNR） confirms that the frame-by-frame quality of the streamed video during the handover is at least 33 dB, which is categorized as good based on ITU-T recommendations. The estimated mean opinion score （MOS） in terms of video playback smoothness is also at a satisfactory level.     

New enhancements to the SOCKS communication network security protocol: Schemes and performance evaluation

In this paper we propose two new enhancements to the SOCKS protocol in the areas of IP multicasting and UDP tunneling. Most network firewalls deployed at the entrance to a private network block multicast traffic. This is because of potential security threats inherent with IP multicast. Multicasting is the backbone of many Internet technologies like voice and video conferencing, real time gaming, multimedia streaming, and online stock quotes, among others. There is a need to be able to safely and securely allow multicast streams to enter into and leave a protected enterprise network. Securing multicast streams is challenging. It poses many architectural issues. The SOCKS protocol is typically implemented in a network firewall as an application-layer gateway. Our first enhancement in the area of IP multicast to the SOCKS protocol is to enable the application of security and access control policies and safely allow multicast traffic to enter into the boundaries of a protected enterprise network. The second enhancement we propose is to allow the establishment of a tunnel between two protected networks that have SOCKS based firewalls to transport UDP datagrams.