Efficient multicast delivery for wireless data center networks

Recently, large-scale data centers are widely built to support various kinds of cloud services, which are mostly delivered by multicast. Even with multicast, cloud services may still generate a large amount of data traffic in some bottleneck links and, even worse, cause network congestion. Thus, how to reduce the redundancy of data transmissions to mitigate network congestion is essential. In addition to wired transmissions, modern data centers adopt wireless links to augment network capacity. Under the coexisting scenario of wired and wireless links, this paper studies multicast data delivery problem. Specifically, a multicast tree problem is defined, and the objective is to minimize the total multicast data traffic. We prove the problem is NP-hard and propose an efficient heuristic algorithm to solve the problem. A series of experiment results shows that our proposed algorithm is very effective, compared with an optimal solution designed for traditional wired data centers.