An Efficient SDN Multicast Architecture for Dynamic Industrial IoT Environments

Large-scale industrial IoT services appear in smart factory domains such as factory clouds which integrate distributed small factories into a large virtual factory with dynamic combination based on orders of consumers. A smart factory has so many industrial elements including various sensors/actuators, gateways, controllers, application servers, and IoT clouds. Since there are complex connections and relations, it is hard to handle them in point-to-point manner. In addition, many duplicated traffics are exchanged between them through the Internet. Multicast is believed as an effective many-to-many communication mechanism by establishing multicast trees between sources and receivers. There are, however, some issues for adopting multicast to large-scale industrial IoT services in terms of QoS. In this paper, we propose a novel software-defined network multicast based on group shared tree which includes near-receiver rendezvous point selection algorithm and group shared tree switching mechanism. As a result, the proposed multicast mechanism can reduce the packet loss by 90% compared to the legacy methods under severe congestion condition. GST switching method obtains to decreased packet delay effect, respectively, 2%, 20% better than the previously studied multicast and the legacy SDN multicast.