Multicasting with the Extended Dijkstra’s Shortest Path Algorithm for Software Defined Networking

This work proposes a multicast algorithm on the basis of the extended Dijkstra’s shortest path algorithm for Software Defined Networking (SDN) to run on top of the controller. The proposed muticast algorithm is used to generate a multicast tree for a data publisher to deliver data packets to all subscribers so that every node and every host on the multicast tree will receive every packet once and at most once for reducing bandwidth consumption. The extended Dijkstra’s algorithm considers not only the edge weights, but also the node weights for a graph derived from the underlying SDN topology. We use Pyretic to implement a proposed algorithm over an SDN network, and compare it with related ones under the Abilene network topology with the Mininet emulation tool. As shown by the comparisons, the proposed algorithm achieves the best performance in terms of throughput, jitter, and packet loss. Keywords—Software Defined Networking (SDN); Multicast; network topology