Flow Aggregation and Light-Tree Establishment in Multicast-Capable Optical Networks

In this paper, we study the problem of multicast flow aggregation combined with light-tree establishment in optical networks. We first give the network model with a tri-partite aggregation graph to describe the problem and show that the problem is NP-complete. We then formulate the problem as an integer linear program (ILP) and give results for small scale problems. A heuristic approach, named fixed tree aggregation (FTA), is presented and results show that FTA achieves good results in both large and small scale problems.