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This is the multicast use case for DIRECTV streaming video delivery network Phase-1.
The Network
The network topology can be viewed as a core network with two types of edges, the sending edge where video streams are encoded into IP packets and injected into the network, the recieving edge is where the video streams are decoded to be eventually delivered to the consumer. The core connects the sending and receiving edges. (This is somewhat over simplified but should suffice for this use case).
The network currently runs legacy unicast and multicast routing protocols namely ISIS & PIM-SSM.
Incremental Deployment
SDN will be incrementally phased into the DIRECTV video distribution network, as I suspect will be the case for many large production networks.
This being the case, we will portions of the network running SDN with adjacent sections running legacy L3 routing protocols. Where niether section knows what the other section is doing.
Phase 1 - Send Side Deployment
The first phase covered in this USE case will be looking at solutions to replacing the sending side of the network with SDN. The initial deployment may include a hybrid deployment meaning that the OpenFlow and Legacy L3 border will exist in a single switch.
Later Use Cases: Phase 2 & 3 will involve SDN on the recieve side and then SDN in the core.
PIM Emulator
Perhaps the most robust way to solve the Ships in the Night problem will require the ONOS controller to understand and speak PIM. This does not mean that we are going to implement all of PIM as a controller app, rather we provide the controller with just enough smarts to interpret PIM messages such that it may create sufficient forwarding state on our OF switch.
PIM-SSM Hello, Join / Prune
This specific use case requires us to emulate PIM-SSM. This will require ONOS to understand PIM Join / Prune messages to determine which ports PIM-SSM expects to receive data from.
In order for PIM-SSM to send a PIM Join/Prune to an OF switch, we will also need to periodically transmit and read PIM Hello messages