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 ≥ 2.3) and the OpenFlow protocol (version ≥ 1.1). Performance evaluations of its control-plane algorithms also imply that SDM is flexible to construct throughput and latency/height optimized multicast trees respecting task requirements.