SDN-Based Multicast Traffic Engineering for Radio Telescope Data Networks

Modern radio telescopes utilize IP multicast in their data networks because multicasting offers enhanced flexibility. Telescope data networks carry high volumes of real-time data and need to support network reconfigurability. Hence, they stand to gain from optimized traffic management. Software-Defined Networking (SDN) simplifies and adds dynamism to multicast routing. We reference the MeerKAT radio telescope data network and investigate methods to route the multicast streams in an SDN context. Such route planning is influenced by the telescope control system along with architectural and dynamic (e.g., link or device failure) properties of the network. This letter shows that SDN is a practical option for radio telescope data networks and that the system is flexible, easy to understand, and scalable. Additionally, we present two basic algorithms which can serve as foundational templates for more tailored solutions.