A Novel Efficient SDN Based Broadcast Scheme

Data centers with millions of physical and virtual end hosts are now the basis for many Internet and cloud computing services. Hence, it is no longer practical to employ the traditional flooding method for the broadcast tasks in such large networks. In order to improve the efficiency of broadcasting among millions of hosts, we present a novel Software Defined Networking (SDN) based broadcast scheme in this paper. In most exsiting SDN technologies, the centralized Controller usually outputs messages to every port of all switches for broadcasting. However, in our scheme, a broadcast tree is previously created and corresponding instructions are installed into the switches as flow entries by the Controller. Hence, the Controller only needs to send a message to one switch, and then the informed switch will automatically spread the message to entire network along the broadcast tree. Therefore, the heavy broadcast task is transferred from the Controller to the distributed switches, which greatly alleviates the burden on the Controller and reduces the interactions between the Controller and switches. Moreover, a prototype is developed and the experimental results prove the good efficiency of the presented broadcast scheme.