A Multi-Stage Solution for NFV-Enabled Multicast Over the Hybrid Infrastructure

The network function virtualization-enabled multicast problem includes constructing traffic forwarding topology, deploying required functions and steering traffic through them. Currently, jointly taking them into consideration is still an open problem and we propose a multi-stage solution to solve it. Specifically, we separate the multicast traffic forwarding and function delivery. The traffic forwarding topology is constructed with minimum spanning tree and the function delivery is implemented with the backtracking strategy. Simulation results show that the proposed solution achieves good performance.