  Achieving high bandwidth utilization in cloud computing is essential for
better network performance. However, it is difficult to attain high bandwidth
utilization in cloud computing due to the complex and distributed natures of
cloud computing resources. Recently, a growing demand for multicast
transmission is perceived in cloud computing, due to the explosive growth of
multi-point communication applications, such as video conferencing, online
gaming, etc. Nonetheless, the inherent complexity in multicast routing in cloud
computing, existing multicast plans failed to produce effective and efficient
protocol schemes, which limits the application of multicast communication on
the Internet. In this paper, a technique is proposed in how the newly developed
network architecture, Software Defined Network (SDN), can promote the design of
the multicast protocol and improve the performance of the multicast
transmission in the cloud computing. The approach is to use the SDN-cloud
Computing-enabled multicast communication scheme with ultra-high bandwidth
utilization. The bandwidth utilization is enhanced by measuring various routing
trees for each multicast transmission session and distributing the traffic load
over all available routes in the cloud computing resources. The SDN is utilized
to tackle with various design hurdles in the cloud computing, including both
the current ones with the conventional multicast pattern and the newly emerged
ones with multi-tree multicast. The prototype implementation and experiments
demonstrate the performance enhancement of the proposed approach in the cloud
computing in compared to conventional single-tree multicast designs.
