The Software Defined Networking (SDN) provides not only a higher level abstraction of lower level functionalities, but also flexibility to create new multicast framework. SDN decouples the low level network elements (forwarding/data plane) from the control/management layer (control plane), where a centralized controller can access and modify the configuration of each distributed network element. The centralized framework allows to develop more network functionalities that can not be easily achieved in the traditional network architecture.

Similarly, Network Function Virtualization (NFV) enables the decoupling of network services from the underlying hardware infrastructure to allow the same Substrate (Physical) Network (SN) shared by multiple Virtual Network (VN) requests. With the network virtualization, the process of mapping virtual nodes and links onto a shared SN while satisfying the computing and bandwidth constraints is referred to as Virtual Network Embedding (VNE), an NP-Hard problem. The VNE problem has drawn a lot of attention from the research community.

In this dissertation, we motivate the importance of characterizing the mode of communication in VN requests, and we focus our attention on the problem of embedding VNs with one-to-many (multicast) communication mode. Throughout the dissertation, we highlight the unique properties of multicast VNs and explore how to efficiently map a given Virtual Multicast Tree/Network (VMT) request onto a substrate IP Network or Elastic Optical Networks (EONs). The major objective of this dissertation is to study how to efficiently embed (i) a given virtual request in IP or optical networks in the form of a multicast tree while minimizing the resource usage and avoiding the redundant multicast tranmission, (ii) a given virtual request in optical networks while minimizing the resource usage and satisfying the fanout limitation on the multicast transmission. Another important contribution of this dissertation is how to efficiently map Service Function Chain (SFC) based virtual multicast request without prior constructed SFC while minimizing the resource usage and satisfying the SFC on the multicast transmission.