Joint NFV placement and routing for multicast service on SDN

Network function visualization (NFV) has emerged as a promising paradigm in networking, where the hardware-based middleboxes are replaced with software-based virtualized entities typically running on the cloud to provide specific functionalities. By deploying NFV, network services become more adaptive and cost-effective. Many multicast services such as real-time multimedia streaming and intrusion detection require appropriate services chaining; however, NFVs placement in the network as well as traffic routing strategy to guarantee that the multicast flows traverse through the services chain before reaching the end user is still an open problem. In this paper, we present an algorithm to solve this problem.

I. Introduction

Group communication is becoming increasingly popular and important due to the huge saving on bandwidth consumption. Many web-based applications such as multimedia distribution system, video conference, software updates, IPTV rely extensively on multicast communication to function normally. Multicast is one of the most fundamental communication styles to send packets to multiple destinations simultaneously. In each router, packets are duplicated and forwarded to multiple ports based on the topology of the multicast mechanism. Compared with Unicast, where single path is built for each demand (pair of source and destination), multicast can significantly reduce the required transmission capacity.