The paper investigates theoretical issues in applying the universal swarming technique to efficient content distribution. In a swarming session, a file is distributed to all the receivers by having all the nodes in the session exchange file chunks. By universal swarming, not only all the nodes in the session, but also some nodes outside the session may participate in the chunk exchange to improve the distribution performance. We present a universal swarming model where the chunks are distributed along different Steiner trees rooted at the source and covering all the receivers. We assume chunks arrive dynamically at the sources and focus on finding stable universal swarming algorithms. To achieve the throughput region, universal swarming usually involves a tree-selection subproblem of finding a min-cost Steiner tree, which is NP-hard. We propose a universal swarming scheme that employs an approximate tree-selection algorithm. We show that it achieves network stability for a reduced throughput region, where the reduction ratio is no more than the approximation ratio of the tree-selection algorithm. We propose a second universal swarming scheme that employs a randomized tree-selection algorithm. It achieves the throughput region, but with a weaker stability result. The proposed schemes and their variants are expected to be useful for infrastructure-based content distribution networks with massive content and relatively stable network environment.
Multicasting can be done in two different ways: source based tree approach and shared tree approach. Protocols such as Core Based Tree (CBT), Protocol Independent Multicasting Sparse Mode (PIM-SM) use shared tree approach. Shared tree approach is preferred over source-based tree approach because in the later construction of minimum cost tree per source is needed unlike a single shared tree in the former approach. In this paper, we present a candidate core selection approach for shared tree multicasting so that in a multicast session different senders can select different cores from the candida…
Achieving high bandwidth utilization in cloud computing is essential for better network performance. However, it is difficult to attain high bandwidth utilization in cloud computing due to the complex and distributed natures of cloud computing resources. Recently, a growing demand for multicast transmission is perceived in cloud computing, due to the explosive growth of multi-point communication applications, such as video conferencing, online gaming, etc. Nonetheless, the inherent complexity in multicast routing in cloud computing, existing multicast plans failed to produce effective and effi…
Although Software-Defined Networking (SDN) enables flexible network resource allocations for traffic engineering, current literature mostly focuses on unicast communications. Compared to traffic engineering for multiple unicast flows, multicast traffic engineering for multiple trees is very challenging not only because minimizing the bandwidth consumption of a single multicast tree by solving the Steiner tree problem is already NP-Hard, but the Steiner tree problem does not consider the link capacity constraint for multicast flows and node capacity constraint to store the forwarding entries in…
In this articlewestudy themulticast routing problem in all-opticalWDMnetworks under the spare light splitting constraint. To implement a multicast session, several light-trees may have to be used due to the limited fanouts of network nodes. Although many multicast routing algorithms have been proposed in order to reduce the total number of wavelength channels used (total cost) for a multicast session, the maximum number of wavelengths required in one fiber link (link stress) and the end-to-end delay are two parameters which are not always taken into consideration. It is known that the shortest…
Software-Defined Networking (SDN) enables flexible network resource allocations for traffic engineering, but at the same time the scalability problem becomes more serious since traffic is more difficult to be aggregated. Those crucial issues in SDN have been studied for unicast but have not been explored for multicast traffic, and addressing those issues for multicast is more challenging since the identities and the number of members in a multicast group can be arbitrary. In this paper, therefore, we propose a new multicast tree for SDN, named Branch-aware Steiner Tree (BST). The BST problem i…
In this paper, three new dynamic multicast routing algorithms based on the greedy tree technique are proposed; Source Optimised Tree, Topology Based Tree and Minimum Diameter Tree. A simulation analysis is presented showing various performance aspects of the algorithms, in which a comparison is made with the greedy and core based tree techniques. The effects of the tree source location on dynamic membership change are also examined. The simulations demonstrate that the Source Optimised Tree algorithm achieves a significant improvement in terms of delay and link usage when compared to the Core …
In Application layer multicast (ALM) also called Overlay Multicast, multicast-related functionalities are moved to end-hosts. The key advantages, overlays offers, are flexibility, adaptability and ease of deployment [1]. Application layer multicast builds a peer-to-peer (P2P) overlay multicast tree topology consisting of end-to-end unicast connections between end-hosts. End users self organize themselves into logical overlay networks for efficient data delivery. Major concern in designing ALM protocol is how to build and maintain a topology, to route data efficiently and reliably. We propose h…
To minimize the number of wavelengths required by a multicast session in sparse light splitting wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) networks, a light-hierarchy structure, which occupies the same wavelength on all links, is proposed to span as many destinations as possible. Different from a light-tree, a light-hierarchy accepts cycles, which are used to traverse crosswise a 4-degree (or above) multicast incapable (MI) node twice (or above) and switch two light signals on the same wavelengths to two destinations in the same multicast session. In this paper, firstly, a graph renewal and distan…
Data center applications use multicast as an effective method to reduce bandwidth cost. However, traditional multicast protocols designed for IP networks are usually bottlenecked by the limited state capacity on switches. In this paper, we propose a scalable multicast solution on fat tree networks based on the observation that data center multicast traffic has strong heterogeneity. We propose to remove the multicast management logic from switches and use the SDN controller to manage multicast groups. The proposed Dual-structure Multicast (DuSM) determines elephant and mice groups according to …
Multicast is the ability of a communication network to accept a single message from an application and to deliver copies of the message to multiple recipients at different location. With the development of Internet, Multicast is widely applied in all kinds of multimedia real-time application: distributed multimedia systems, collaborative computing, video-conferencing, distance education, etc. In order to construct a delay-constrained multicast routing tree, average distance heuristic (ADH) algorithm is analyzed firstly. Then a delay-constrained algorithm called DCADH (delay-constrained average…
The high-level contribution of this paper is to establish benchmarks for the minimum hop count per source-receiver path and the minimum number of edges per tree for multicast routing in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) under different mobility models. In this pursuit, we explore the tradeoffs between these two routing strategies with respect to hop count, number of edges and lifetime per multicast tree with respect to the Random Waypoint, City Section and Manhattan mobility models. We employ the Breadth First Search algorithm and the Minimum Steiner Tree heuristic for determining a sequence of …
Multicast plays an important role in implementing the group communications in bandwidth scarce multihop mobile ad hoc networks. However, due to the dynamic topology of MANETs it is very difficult to build optimal multicast trees and maintaining group membership, making even more challenging to implement scalable and robust multicast in Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANET). A scalable and energy efficient location aware multicast algorithm, called SEELAMP, for mobile ad hoc networks is presented in the paper that is based on creation of shared tree using the physical location of the nodes for the mul…
As we know, the member-only algorithm in provides the best links stress and wavelength usage for the construction of multicast light-trees in WDM networks with sparse splitting. However, the diameter of tree is too big and the average delay is also too large, which are intolerant for QoS required multimedia applications. In this paper, a distance priority based algorithm is proposed to build light-trees for multicast routing, where the Candidate Destinations and the Candidate Connectors are introduced. Simulations show the proposed algorithm is able to greatly reduce the diameter and average d…
Based on the false assumption that multicast incapable (MI) nodes could not be traversed twice on the same wavelength, the light-tree structure was always thought to be optimal for multicast routing in sparse splitting Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) networks. In fact, for establishing a multicast session, an MI node could be crosswise visited more than once to switch a light signal towards several destinations with only one wavelength through different input and output pairs. This is called Cross Pair Switching (CPS). Thus, a new multicast routing structure light-hierarchy is proposed …
In sparse light splitting all-optical WDM networks, the more destinations a light-tree can accommodate, the fewer light-trees andwavelengths amulticast session will require. In this article, a Hypo-Steiner light-tree algorithm (HSLT) is proposed to construct a HSLT light-tree to include as many destinations as possible. The upper bound cost of the light-trees built by HSLT is given as N(N -1)/2, where N is the number of nodes in the network. The analytical model proves that, under the same condition, more destinations could be held in a HSLT than a Member-Only (Zhang et al., J. Lightware Techn…
In hierarchical reliable multicast environment, makespan is the time that is required to fully and successfully transmit a packet from the sender to all receivers. Low makespan is vital for achieving high throughput with a TCP-like window based sending scheme. In hierarchical reliable multicast methods, the number of repair servers and their locations influence the makespan. In this paper we propose a new method to decide the locations of repair servers that can reduce the makespan in hierarchical reliable multicast networks. Our method has a formulation based on mixed integer programming to a…
Designing energy-efficient all-to-all multicasting protocols is of of great importance for multi-hop wireless networks such as wireless sensor networks and wireless ad hoc networks. In an all-to-all multicast session, there exists a set of wireless destination nodes, and each destination node needs to send some data packets to all other destination nodes. We consider the problem of building a shared multicast tree spanning the destination nodes such that the total energy consumption of realizing an all-to-all multicast session using the shared multicast tree is minimized. Since building such a…
Smart grids have received much attention in recent years in order to optimally manage the resources, transmission and consumption of electric power.In these grids, one of the most important communication services is the multicast service. Providing multicast services in the smart communicative grid poses several challenges, including the heterogeneity of different communication media and the strict requirements of reliability, security and latency. Wireless technologies and PLC connections are the two most important media used in this grid, among which PLC connections are very unstable, which …
Guilin University of Electronic Technology（桂林电子科技大学）；Fujian University of Technology（福建工程学院）；Peng Cheng Lab.（鹏城实验室）
Traditional multicast routing methods have some problems in constructing a multicast tree, such as limited access to network state information, poor adaptability to dynamic and complex changes in the network, and inflexible data forwarding. To address these defects, the optimal multicast routing problem in software-defined networking (SDN) is tailored as a multi-objective optimization problem, and an intelligent multicast routing algorithm DRL-M4MR based on the deep Q network (DQN) deep reinforcement learning (DRL) method is designed to construct a multicast tree in SDN. First, the multicast t…
Unlike wired networks, the capacity of a wireless network is interference limited due to the broadcast nature of wireless medium. Some multicast wireless network protocols do not consider channel assignment issue, that they cause interference at transmission nodes, hence do not use full capacity of the network. Interference can be reduced and throughput improved with the use of multichannel features. Therefore, this paper used orthogonal channels for sending and receiving nodes in the network. We propose EWM (Efficient Wireless Multicast) method that is distributed scheme for constructing mult…
Searching in P2P networks is fundamental to all overlay networks. P2P networks based on Distributed Hash Tables (DHT) are optimized for single key lookups, whereas unstructured networks offer more complex queries at the cost of increased traffic and uncertain success rates. Our Distributed Tree Construction (DTC) approach enables structured P2P networks to perform prefix search, range queries, and multicast in an optimal way. It achieves this by creating a spanning tree over the peers in the search area, using only information available locally on each peer. Because DTC creates a spanning tree…
On account of the progress of network multimedia technology, more and more real-time multimedia applications arrive with the need to transmit information using multicast communication. These applications are more important with the arrival of mobile IPv6 protocol through mobile receivers and sources. These applications require a multicast routing protocol which has packets arriving at multicast receptors within a specified QoS guaranteed and a quick recovery mechanism. When multicasting with mobile IPv6, the mobility of a receivers and senders may lead to serious problems. When the receiver or…
Several organizations have built multiple datacenters connected via dedicated wide area networks over which large inter-datacenter transfers take place. This includes tremendous volumes of bulk multicast traffic generated as a result of data and content replication. Although one can perform these transfers using a single multicast forwarding tree, that can lead to poor performance as the slowest receiver on each tree dictates the completion time for all receivers. Using multiple trees per transfer each connected to a subset of receivers alleviates this concern. The choice of multicast trees al…
In traditional massive content distribution with multiple sessions, the sessions form separate overlay networks and operate independently, where some sessions may suffer from insufficient resources even though other sessions have excessive resources. To cope with this problem, we consider the universal swarming approach, which allows multiple sessions to cooperate with each other. We formulate the problem of finding the optimal resource allocation to maximize the sum of the session utilities and present a subgradient algorithm which converges to the optimal solution in the time-average sense. …
We propose a multicast scheduling scheme to exploit content reuse when there is asynchronicity in user requests. A unicast transmission setup is used for content delivery, while multicast transmission is employed opportunistically to reduce wireless resource usage. We then develop a multicast scheduling scheme for the downlink multiple-input multiple output orthogonal-frequency division multiplexing system in IEEE 802.11 wireless local area network (WLAN). At each time slot, the scheduler serves the users by either unicast or multicast transmission. Out-sequence data received by a user is stor…
Many of the video streaming applications in today's Internet involve the distribution of content from a CDN source to a large population of interested clients. However, widespread support of IP multicast is unavailable due to technical and economical reasons, leaving the floor to application layer multicast which introduces excessive delays for the clients and increased traffic load for the network. This paper is concerned with the introduction of an SDN-based framework that allows the network controller to not only deploy IP multicast between a source and subscribers, but also control, via a …
Multimedia traffic is predicted to account for 82% of the total data traffic by the year 2020. With the increasing popularity of video streaming applications like YouTube, Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, popular video content is often required to be delivered to a large number of users simultaneously. Multicast transmission can be used for catering to such applications efficiently. The common content can be transmitted to the users on the same resources resulting in considerable resource conservation. This paper proposes various schemes for efficient grouping and resource allocation for multicast…
In this paper we model the tomography of scale free networks by studying the structure of layers around an arbitrary network node. We find, both analytically and empirically, that the distance distribution of all nodes from a specific network node consists of two regimes. The first is characterized by rapid growth, and the second decays exponentially. We also show that the nodes degree distribution at each layer is a power law with an exponential cut-off. We obtain similar results for the layers surrounding the root of multicast trees cut from such networks, as well as the Internet. All of our…
Caching at small base stations (SBSs) has demonstrated significant benefits in alleviating the backhaul requirement in heterogeneous cellular networks (HetNets). While many existing works focus on what contents to cache at each SBS, an equally important problem is what contents to deliver so as to satisfy dynamic user demands given the cache status. In this paper, we study optimal content delivery in cache-enabled HetNets by taking into account the inherent multicast capability of wireless medium. We consider stochastic content multicast scheduling to jointly minimize the average network delay…
Bandwidth hungry video content has become the dominant contributor to the data traffic world over. Cellular networks are constantly evolving to meet the growing traffic demands. Over the past few years, wireless multicast has been garnering a lot of attention as a means of efficient resource utilization. Multicast transmission lets spectral resources to be shared between users streaming the same content. Even though multicast transmission allows to serve multiple users on the same resources, in order to serve all these users successfully, the base station cannot transmit the content at a rate …
Multi cast communication is a key technology for wireless mesh networks. Multicast provides efficient data distribution among a group of nodes, Generally sensor networks and MANETs uses multicast algorithms which are designed to be energy efficient and to achieve optimal route discovery among mobile nodes whereas wireless mesh networks needs to maximize throughput. Here we propose two multicast algorithms: The Level Channel Assignment (LCA) algorithm and the Multi-Channel Multicast (MCM) algorithm to improve the throughput for multichannel sand multi interface mesh networks. The algorithm buil…
This paper addresses a multi-criteria decision method properly designed to effectively evaluate the most performing strategy for multicast content delivery in Long Term Evolution (LTE) and beyond systems. We compared the legacy conservative-based approach with other promising strategies in literature, i.e., opportunistic multicasting and subgroup-based policies tailored to exploit different cost functions, such as maximum throughput, proportional fairness and the multicast dissatisfaction index (MDI). We provide a comparison among above schemes in terms of aggregate data rate (ADR), fairness a…
Multicast in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is an attractive mechanism for delivering data to multiple receivers as it saves bandwidth. To guarantee the security of multicast, the group key is used to encrypt and decrypt the packages. However, providing key management services in WSNs is complicated because sensor nodes possess limited resources of computing, storage and communication. To address the balance between security and limited resources, a multicast group key management protocol based on the weight-balanced 2-3 tree is proposed to generate, distribute, and update the group key secur…
Caching and multicasting at base stations are two promising approaches to support massive content delivery over wireless networks. However, existing scheduling designs do not make full use of the advantages of the two approaches. In this paper, we consider the optimal dynamic multicast scheduling to jointly minimize the average delay, power, and fetching costs for cache-enabled content-centric wireless networks. We formulate this stochastic optimization problem as an infinite horizon average cost Markov decision process (MDP). It is well-known to be a difficult problem due to the curse of dime…
We consider the problem of establishing minimum-cost multicast connections over coded packet networks, i.e. packet networks where the contents of outgoing packets are arbitrary, causal functions of the contents of received packets. We consider both wireline and wireless packet networks as well as both static multicast (where membership of the multicast group remains constant for the duration of the connection) and dynamic multicast (where membership of the multicast group changes in time, with nodes joining and leaving the group). For static multicast, we reduce the problem to a polynomial-tim…
Loss tomography has received considerable attention in recent years and a number of estimators have been proposed. Unfortunately, almost all of them are devoted to the tree topology despite the general topology is more common in practice. In addition, most of the works presented in the literature rely on iterative approximation to search for the maximum of a likelihood function formed from observations, which have been known neither scalable nor efficient. In contrast to the tree topology, there is few paper dedicated to the general topology because of the lack of understanding the impacts cre…
Multicast data transfers occur in many distributed systems and applications (e.g. IPTV, Grids, content delivery networks). Because of this, efficient multicast data distribution optimization techniques are required. In the first part of this paper we present a small diameter, bounded degree, collaborative peer-to-peer multicast tree architecture, which supports dynamic node arrivals and departures making local decisions only. The architecture is fault tolerant and, at low arrival and departure rates, converges towards a theoretically optimal structure. In the second part of the paper we consid…
The completion time for the dissemination (or alternatively, aggregation) of information from all nodes in a network plays a critical role in the design and analysis of communication systems, especially in real time applications for which delay is critical. In this work, we analyse the completion time of data dissemination in a shared loss (i.e., unreliable links) multicast tree, at the limit of large number of nodes. Specifically, analytic expressions for upper and lower bounds on the expected completion time are provided, and, in particular, it is shown that both these bounds scale as $α\log…
In this paper, we present a new methodology for developing systematic and automatic test generation algorithms for multipoint protocols. These algorithms attempt to synthesize network topologies and sequences of events that stress the protocol's correctness or performance. This problem can be viewed as a domain-specific search problem that suffers from the state space explosion problem. One goal of this work is to circumvent the state space explosion problem utilizing knowledge of network and fault modeling, and multipoint protocols. The two approaches investigated in this study are based on f…
Evaluation of Internet protocols usually uses random scenarios or scenarios based on designers' intuition. Such approach may be useful for average-case analysis but does not cover boundary-point (worst or best-case) scenarios. To synthesize boundary-point scenarios a more systematic approach is needed.In this paper, we present a method for automatic synthesis of worst and best case scenarios for protocol boundary-point evaluation. Our method uses a fault-oriented test generation (FOTG) algorithm for searching the protocol and system state space to synthesize these scenarios. The algorithm is b…
Recent studies show that the coded caching technique can facilitate the wireless content distribution by mitigating the wireless traffic rate during the peak-traffic time, where the contents are partially prefetched to the local cache of mobile devices during the off-peak time. The remaining contents are then jointly coded and delivered in multicast, when many content requests are initiated in the peak-traffic time. The requested contents can be recovered from the local-prefetched and multicast data with requesters experiencing less congestions. However, the benefit of the coded caching scheme…
In this paper we consider several content delivery problems (broadcast and multicast, in particular) in some restricted types of distributed systems (e.g. optical Grids and wireless sensor networks with tree-like topologies). For each problem we provide efficient algorithmic techniques for computing optimal content delivery strategies. The techniques we present are offline, which means that they can be used only when full information is available and the problem parameters do not fluctuate too much.
The advent of multipoint (multicast-based) applications and the growth and complexity of the Internet has complicated network protocol design and evaluation. In this paper, we present a method for automatic synthesis of worst and best case scenarios for multipoint protocol performance evaluation. Our method uses a fault-oriented test generation (FOTG) algorithm for searching the protocol and system state space to synthesize these scenarios. The algorithm is based on a global finite state machine (FSM) model. We extend the algorithm with timing semantics to handle end-to-end delays and address …
The coded caching scheme originally proposed by Maddah-Ali and Niesen (MAN) transmits coded multicast messages from a server to users equipped with caches via a capacitated shared-link and was shown to be information theoretically optimal within a constant multiplicative factor. This work extends the MAN scheme to a class of two-hop wired-wireless networks including one server connected via fronthaul links to a layer of $H$ helper nodes (access points/base stations), which in turns communicate via a wireless access network to $K$ users, each equipped with its own cache. Two variants are consid…
In this paper we design and prove correct a fully dynamic distributed algorithm for maintaining an approximate Steiner tree that connects via a minimum-weight spanning tree a subset of nodes of a network (referred as Steiner members or Steiner group) . Steiner trees are good candidates to efficiently implement communication primitives such as publish/subscribe or multicast, essential building blocks for the new emergent networks (e.g. P2P, sensor or adhoc networks). The cost of the solution returned by our algorithm is at most $\log |S|$ times the cost of an optimal solution, where $S$ is the …
For successful estimation, the usual network tomography algorithms crucially require i) end-to-end data generated using multicast probe packets, real or emulated, and ii) the network to be a tree rooted at a single sender with destinations at leaves. These requirements, consequently, limit their scope of application. In this paper, we address successfully a general problem, henceforth called generalized network tomography, wherein the objective is to estimate the link performance parameters for networks with arbitrary topologies using only end-to-end measurements of pure unicast probe packets.…
