An intelligent multicast traffic engineering method over software defined networks

Software Defined Network (SDN) is a new networking paradigm which can be used to provide desired traffic engineering policies over a network. Recently, multicast applications such as video conferencing, IPTV and online gaming have emerged in most environments. One of the main issues in such applications is to provide essential Quality of Service (QoS) for end users. Due to limitations of IP-based networks, guaranteeing QoS parameters such as end-to-end delay and packet loss for multicast applications pose many challenges. In SDN, however, the network controller has a global view on network resources and network administrators can use desired policies for increasing network performance regarding QoS requirements. In this paper a new adaptive traffic engineering method is proposed which models the QoS provisioning problem as an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) and solves the problem by ant colony algorithm. Performance evaluation results show that the proposed method achieves higher performance in comparison with other traditional multicast routing protocols such as PIM-SM.