Groupcast in Wavelength-Routed WDM Networks

Multiparty communication in high-speed networks is gaining momentum due to the increasing demands of bandwidth-intensive parallel computing and collaborative applications. Groupcast is a generalized multiparty communication paradigm, where multiple collaborative parties deliver traffic streams to all parties participating in the collaboration. This paper investigates the routing and wavelength assignment (RWA) problem for efficient groupcast traffic provisioning in wavelength-division-multiplexing optical networks. The mathematical formulation of groupcast RWA is presented via integer linear programming, and two heuristic algorithms are proposed to efficiently solve the groupcast RWA problem. The first heuristic (in-group per-group-grooming) allows traffic grooming within each collaboration group, while the second heuristic (cross-group per-source-grooming) allows cross-group traffic grooming at common source nodes. The performances of the proposed heuristics with regard to the number of line terminators (consisting of transmitters and receivers) and the number of wavelength channels are compared under various network topologies and traffic configurations