Routing and wavelength assignment in all-optical networks with multicast traffic

This paper considers multicast routing and wavelength assignment (MCRWA) in a wide area all-optical network. We present static and dynamic MCRWA algor ithms, acid evaluate their blocking performance under various fanout splitt ing policies. Through simulations and comparisons with a lower bound, we de monstrate that dynamic MCRWA can perform significantly better than its stat ic counterparts. We then quantify the throughput gain due to link sharing i n multicasting, and the performance penalty that would be suffered by consi dering each multicast request as multiple unicast connection requests. We a lso present an analytical model for estimating the blocking performance of the static MCRWA algorithms. The performance improvement with multifiber ne tworks and with wavelength conversion are also investigated.