S/G Light-tree: Multicast grooming architecture for improved resource allocation

Internet traffic demands are constantly increasing and a considerable amount of this increase is expected to be of multicast type. Optical transport networks (OTN)must be prepared in terms of better resource utilization for accommodating multicast traffic. For this purpose multicast traffic grooming has been considered. Light-trees have been proposed for supporting multicast connections in OTN. Nevertheless when light-trees are used with traffic grooming, resources can be overutilized as traffic can be routed to undesirable destinations in order to avoid optical-electrical-optical (OEO)conversions. In this paper a novel architecture named S/G light-tree for supporting multicast connections is proposed. The architecture allows to eliminate and aggregate traffic in different wavelengths without performing OEO conversions.The architecture uses labels supported by generalized multiprotocol label switching (GMPLS). A heuristic that routes traffic demands using less wavelengths by taking advantage of the proposed architecture is designed as well. Simulation results show that the architecture can minimize the number of used wavelengths and OEO conversions when compared to light-trees.