All-optical multicasting on wavelength-routed WDM networks with partial replication

An all-optical multicast heuristic (AOMH) method is proposed to perform all-optical multicasting on WDM networks. AOMH first divides the members of a multicast group into MCG (multicast-capable group) and MIG (multicast-incapable group). If the MCG is empty or the fanout constraints are not satisfied, AOMH will add some proxy MC (PMC) nodes in the MCG to satisfy the constraints. Then the multicast tree is determined in three steps. First, AOMH constructs a multicast tree for the MCG. Second, AOMH partitions MIC into several sub-MIGs according to the distances to the members of the MCG. Finally, AOMH generates the multicast sub-trees rooted at the members of the MCG with the destinations of their own sub-MIGs. AOMH has a good performance if the number of MC nodes is larger than 20% of the number of nodes in a network. Furthermore, if a node has a higher degree, multicast capable devices will be required to improve the network performance