TopoSync: Network-driven Synchronization of Multicast Traffic in Software-defined Environments
Felix Bachmann, Robert Bauer, Hauke Heseding · 2019
This paper deals with synchronized multicast reception, i.e., all data packets sent towards a multicast group are received by the group members at approximately the same time. This is an important requirement for some emergency applications, e.g., push-to-talk services like TETRA or DMR. The presented TopoSync approach exploits recent advancements in the field of Software-defined Networking (SDN) to address synchronization directly inside the network, i.e., no dedicated support for synchronization is required by the applications. It is based on the idea of application-specific multicast distribution trees that exploit paths of different length in the topology to reduce the variance in packet reception times. We present the architecture for TopoSync and an ILP-based problem formulation that respects synchronization requirements. The evaluation of a push-to-talk use-case shows that TopoSync is a significant improvement with respect to synchronized reception over approaches that do not consider synchronization.