Multicast routing with power consideration in sparse splitting WDM networks

Supporting multicast communications in WDM networks has become an important and attractive topic. We study constrained multicast routing with power consideration in WDM networks, where power is attenuated due to (i) the number of concatenated fanouts (splitting), and (ii) the propagation from source node to any multicast member. We propose a heuristic algorithm called centralized-splitting algorithm to re-construct the multicast routing paths established by the member-only algorithm, which can provide the best bandwidth and wavelength usage in the multicast routing construction with sparse splitting constraint. In comparison to the member-only algorithm, the centralized-splitting algorithm (i) does not increase the time complexity significantly, especially when the size of multicast group is large; (ii) can reduce the power loss up to 17% in average, while it still maintains proper bandwidth, wavelength usage and delay requirements