Multicast under Multi-Drop Models

Abstract

In the preceding chapter we have discussed how to establish QoS guaranteed multicast connections in WDM networks. It was assumed that all nodes in the network were equipped with multicast-capable optical switches and an input optical signal can be split into arbitrary many output optical signals. In practice, however, this is not the case. In fact, since today’s networks were designed to mainly support unicast (point-to-point) communication, routing nodes in most of networks do not have multicast capability [16]. In some networks, nodes just have a limited multicast capability, that is, an input optical signal can be split into a limited number of output optical signals. This is because an optical signal transmitted at a source node has fixed amount of power, each time an optical signal is split at a router onto multiple output ports a splitting loss is incurred which reduces the power of the signal at each of the outputs. Thus the application of routing light-trees based multicast is not easy.KeywordsShort PathSpan TreeDestination NodeSteiner TreeNetwork CostThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.