Multicast Advance Reservation RWA Heuristics in Wavelength-Routed Networks

In this paper we introduce the static multicast advance reservation (MCAR) problem for all-optical wavelength-routed WDM networks. Advance reservation connection requests specify their start time to be some time in the future and also specify their holding times. We investigate the static MCAR problem where the set of advance reservation requests is known ahead of time. We develop two efficient heuristics, ISH and SA, to solve the problem for practical size networks. We also introduce a theoretical lower bound on the number of wavelengths required. To evaluate our heuristics we run simulations over real-world, large scale networks and compare them to our lower bound. We find the SA heuristic provides up to a 21% improvement over ISH (14% on average) on realistic networks. SA provides, on average, solutions 1.5-1.8x times the cost given by our conservative lower bound on large networks.