Multicast with a new switching structure in optical networks

Abstract

The emergence of new services demands for a multicast function in optical networks. At the same time, wavelength converters are introduced to increase the efficiency of wavelength usage. It is because of the high cost and complex architecture of optical multicast and wavelength conversion technology, that a new switch structure is introduced, in which optical splitters and wavelength converters are shared per-node. In order to accommodate this architecture, a multicast routing and wavelength assignment algorithm in a splitter–converter-sharing optical network and a changing link weight policy to balance network traffic are proposed. By extending RSVP-TE (Resource ReSerVation Protocol-Traffic Engineering) and OSPF-TE (Open Shortest Path First-Traffic Engineering), an optical multicast mechanism is provided, and message type, signaling flow, and finite state machine model are given. Simulations of NSFNET show that, when the number of splitters and converters are 50% and 12.5% of the full equipment respectively, the performance is close to the ideal case. Using a changing link weight policy can improve performance greatly, when there are enough splitters and converters.