All optical switching control

With the constantly increasing multimedia real time applications, such as video conferencing and distributed games, which are bandwidth-intensive applications, all-optical multiple delivery has become increasingly important in order to enhance multicast applications´ performance. This technique consists in delivering an optical signal from a source edge router to multiple destinations without going through O/E/O conversion. In this paper, we present an optical multicast control based on a concept, referred to as virtual multicast tree. The virtual multicast paradigm is used in order to underline that the multicast tree is not physically established, contrary to the proposed multicast approaches for optical networks. Indeed, a codeword is assigned to each node in the optical network and serves as an optical identifier. Based on the received codeword and the structure we build in, a node can provide the capability to switch an optical traffic to one or several output ports allowing to reach the destination edge nodes in a predefined group. This function is built on the design of appropriate dynamic optical circuits.