Dynamic wavelength assignment for multicast in all-optical WDM networks to maximize the network capacity

We study the problem of wavelength assignment for multicast in order to maximize the network capacity in all-optical wavelength-division multiplexing networks. The motivation behind this work is to minimize the call blocking probability by maximizing the remaining network capacity after each wavelength assignment. While all previous studies on the same objective concentrate only on the unicast case, we study the problem for the multicast case. For a general multicast tree, we prove that the multicast wavelength assignment problem of maximizing the network capacity is NP-hard and propose two efficient greedy algorithms. We also study the same problem for a special network topology, a bidirectional ring network, which is practically the most important topology for optical networks. For bidirectional ring networks, a special multicast tree with at most two leaf nodes is constructed. Polynomial time algorithms for multicast wavelength assignment to maximize the network capacity exist under such a special multicast tree with regard to different splitting capabilities. Our work is the first effort to study the multicast wavelength assignment problem under the objective of maximizing network capacity.