A Scalable Multicast Source Routing Architecture for Data Center Networks

This paper introduces a new scalable, efficient and stateless source routing scheme to ensure that unified unicast and multicast packets can be delivered in the Data Center Networks (DCNs). This scheme, called Code-Oriented eXplicit multicast (COXcast), is based on unicast and eXplicit multicast (Xcast). It constructs the unicast path and multicast tree by encoding the corresponding output port bitmap of each intermediate node. Using a common identifier and a node-specific key, so packets can be self-routed to multiple receivers without requiring header modification. In addition, intermediate switches/routers on the path/tree can be stateless. Compared to traditional source-based unicasting and explicit-based multicasting schemes, COXcast has lowered the processing cost, protocol overhead and delivery latency, while simplifying the deployment and management of a large number of medium-scale multicast groups, especially when applied to large-scale DCNs.