The transmission time analysis of IPTV multicast service in SDN/OpenFlow environments

Software Defined Network has a centralized controller that regulates packet forwarding by updating flow tables of switches. The sole responsibility of these OpenFlow-enabled switches is to forward packets according to rules in their flow tables. The function of Software Defined Network is similar to the traditional IPTV protocol that there are Rendezvous Point be the intermediate node. Rendezvous Point is a node in the network that creates routing between servers and clients. This paper proposes an application of SDN/OpenFlow in IPTV multicasting implementation. An important function of IPTV multicasting is the Joint/Leave request of client in a multicast group. In order to obtain an efficient IPTV service routing, Dijkstra´s and Prim´s algorithms were used to comparatively calculate minimum total edge weight. Mininet environment is used to emulate our system, which consists of Open vSwitch and a POX controller. Our experiments compare the transmission time of the first joint/receive packet to a client when using Dijkstra´s and Prim´s algorithms. We define the edge weight as the distance between two adjacent nodes.