Optimization of Multicast Traffic in Elastic Optical Networks With Distance-Adaptive Transmission

In this letter, we propose three new approaches to optimizing multicast traffic in elastic optical networks that implement distance-adaptive transmission. Two of the approaches are based on integer linear programming modeling, whereas the last one is an effective heuristic. We also compare our approaches with reference methods proposed in the literature. The comparison is based on numerical experiments supported by a discussion on the effectiveness and applicability of the considered methods. The algorithms based on candidate tree modeling of multicasting outperform other methods for larger problem instances in terms of spectrum usage and applicability.