Constructing multicast routing tree for inter-cloud data transmission: an approximation algorithmic perspective

Networking plays a crucial role in cloud computing especially in an inter-cloud environment, where data communications among data centers located at different geographical sites form the foundation of inter-cloud federation. Data transmissions required for inter-cloud federation in the complex inter-cloud networking system are often point-to-multi points, which calls for a more effective and efficient multicast routing algorithm in complex networking systems. In this paper, we investigate the multicast routing problem in the inter-cloud context with K constraints where K U+2265 2. Unlike most of existing algorithms that are too complex to be applied in practical scenarios, a novel and fast algorithm for establishing multicast routing tree for interclouds is proposed. The proposed algorithm leverages an entropybased process to aggregate all weights into a comprehensive metric, and then uses it to search a multicast tree U+0028 MT U+0029 on the basis of the shortest path tree U+0028 SPT U+0029.We conduct complexity analysis and extensive simulations for the proposed algorithm from the approximation perspective. Both analytical and experimental results demonstrate that the algorithm is more efficient than a representative multi-constrained multicast routing algorithm in terms of both speed and accuracy, and thus we believe that the proposed algorithm is applicable to the inter-cloud environment.