Toward Latency‐Efficient Multicast Coflow Scheduling for Reconfigurable Data Center Networks

ABSTRACT The emerging optical circuit technology, which can establish circuit connections among switches, has been proposed as a promising paradigm for data center networks. This paper investigates the problem of minimizing the completion time of multicast coflows in optical circuit switches (OCSs)‐based data center networks. The existing works either only focused on multicast coflow scheduling or focused solely on circuit scheduling in OCS‐based networks, which greatly limits their performance. Hence, in this paper, we study how to reduce the completion time of multicast coflows by considering circuit scheduling and coflow scheduling simultaneously. First, the problem of multicast coflow scheduling is formulated and proved to be NP‐hard. Then, a Delay‐efficient Multicast Coflow Scheduling (DMCS) algorithm is proposed by integrating multicast coflow scheduling with circuit scheduling. The proposed DMCS algorithm is proved to have an approximation ratio of at most , where represents the number of OCS. Through extensive simulations, it is shown that the proposed DMCS algorithm can achieve high performance compared to state‐of‐the‐art methods.