Scalable and Adaptive Software Defined Network Management for Cloud-hosted Group Communication Applications

Group communications form the primary communication pattern for many cloud-hosted applications and cloud infrastructure management services, such as system health monitoring, multimedia distribution, collaborative applications and distributed databases. Although IP multicast has been used to support group communication semantics in diverse Internet-based distributed applications, its deployment in cloud Data Center Networks (DCNs) has been limited due to its higher resource consumption, scalability, and stability issues, which in turn degrades the utility of the cloud. Software Defined Networking (SDN) has enabled the re-engineering of multicast capabilities to overcome these limitations. To that end, this paper presents an autonomous, dynamic and flexible middleware solution called SDN-based Multicast (SDMC), which provides both network load-aware and switch memory-efficient group communication semantics in DCNs. Thus, SDMC improves DCN resource utilization while allowing applications to remain agnostic to the underlying group communication semantics by efficiently toggling between unicast and multicast in accordance with changing network bandwidth and switch memory usage. Empirical studies comparing SDMC with traditional IP multicast shows up to 60% better latency performance for different DCNs topologies, and up to 50% better performance in the switch memory utilization for multicast groups exceeding size 30.