D2M: Mobility-Aware Dynamic Data Multicasting in Software-Defined Data Center Networks

In this paper, we study the problem of mobility-aware dynamic data multicasting in software-defined Data Center Networks (DCNs) in the presence of Internet of Things (IoT) devices. In the existing literature, researchers studied that due to unbalanced traffic distribution in DCN, the network throughput and delay degrade significantly. Moreover, with the integration of heterogeneous IoT devices, the difficulty in achieving balanced traffic distribution increases. Hence, there is a need to design an efficient data multicasting scheme in DCN, while integrating the software-defined network architecture. In this work, we propose a Dynamic Data Multicasting scheme, named D2M, using single leader multiple follower Stackelberg game for ensuring high utilization of network capacity and efficient load balancing. In D2M, the controller acts as the leader, and the switches act as the followers. The leader decides the distribution of flow-rules among the switches for ensuring efficient load-balancing. We represent bandwidth distribution as a pseudo-Cournot competition, where each follower decides the optimal bandwidth to be allocated for each flow. The existence of at least one Nash equilibrium using D2M is ensured. Through simulation, we observed that using D2M, the network throughput increased by 6.13–95.32% than using existing schemes, while ensuring 21.32–99.29% reduction in delay.