A Reliable Path-Based Multicast Solution for File-Stream Distribution

Multicast is a network communication technique that allows a server to send data to a group of recipients. One of the major advantages of multicast is reducing the sender's bandwidth requirements to deliver data to the receivers. To support wide-area network multicast, specifically IP multicast, several supporting protocols have been standardized and implemented by equipment vendors. However, due to feasibility and desirability, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and enterprise network engineers have not enabled IP multicast service.
Our interest in network multicast resulted from two simultaneous events: a top-down application push for reliable multicast, and a bottom-up technological advance in the form of Software-Defined Networks (SDN). We identified the need for a reliable network multicast solution in an application called Local Data Manager (LDM). LDM uses reliable unicast connections to distribute scientific file streams reliably to hundreds of receivers. With the advent of SDN, it is feasible to propose a high-performance, reliable, secure network multicast solution using SDN technologies.
This reliable path-based multicast SDN solution was integrated with the existing LDM, LDM6, to create a new version called LDM7, and tested with feeds (file-streams) from the Internet Data Distribution (IDD) meteorology data-dissemination project. Specifically, LDM7 was implemented to use a Dynamic Reliable File-Steam Multicast (DRFSM) service, which consists of data-plane functionality and control-plane modules. Because the use of SDN controllers in DRFSM service simplifies the design and development of the data-plane functionality, the complexity of the design of DRFSM service shifts to the control plane. Consequently, this dissertation investigated a reliable path-based multicast solution in four ways: 1) an in-depth study to explore the factors that have an impact on the performance for analyzing the data-plane functionality of DRFSM; 2) the design of control-plane protocols used for DRFSM service and a seamless dynamic Layer-2 (L2) path scheme to solve the issue of traffic disruption during L2 multipoint VLAN reconfiguration; 3) a multi-domain WAN trial deployment with a performance monitoring system for evaluating LDM7; and 4) two LDM7 authentication schemes to provide multicast data integrity. The experimental results verified the feasibility of the proposed high-performance, reliable, secure multicast solution. Furthermore, compared to the LDM6, the LDM7 outperforms in any tested configurations with a given set of sender and receivers.