Critical resource multicast protection in data center networks

Resources in a network are imperfect, and equipment failure can have detrimental effects on data and transmission success rates. Attempts to improve the survivability of network communications when these failures occur focus primarily on protection against the common occurrence of link failures, while nodal failure has been largely overlooked. In data-critical infrastructures, such as cloud computing or data center networks, wherein the critical points of interest are at the nodes, a natural disaster or directed attack could have catastrophic consequences for the localized data. To overcome single points of failure, replicated multicast transmissions can be used to distribute copies of critical data to various geographically dispersed locations on the grid. We therefore explore strategies to protect against single critical node failures during multicast transmissions. We propose three novel multicast survivable heuristics and quantitatively analyze and then compare them to traditional multicast provisioning schemes through extensive simulation.¹