Network Function Virtualization enabled multicast routing on SDN

Many multicast services such as live multimedia distribution and real-time event monitoring require constructing a multicast mechanism that involves network functions (e.g. firewall, video transcoding). Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is a concept that proposes using virtualization to implement network functions on infrastructure building block (such as high volume servers, virtual machines), where software provides the functionality of existing purpose-built network equipment. We present an approach for building the multicast mechanism whereby multicast flows are processed by NFV before reaching their end users. We propose a routing algorithm and a method for building an appropriate multicast topology.