Benefits of Multi Wavelength Approach to Converter Placement to Support Broadcast with Available Wavelengths

Optical networks are widely used in communication systems. Finding optimal converter placement for broadcast on optical networks has been an important area of research. In this problem, the free wavelengths on different links of a optical network are used to support network-wide broadcast, which is useful as a control channel or other OAM tasks. Previous work has articulated the essential difficulty of this problem. In this work, we recognize that bandwidth minimization is not an appropriate goal for this problem, and by using multiple wavelengths, and replicating some transmissions, it is possible to reduce the number of converters. We show example schemas to show that the difference in the optimal number of converters can be arbitrarily large, that adopting multiple wavelength paths whose union contains cycles can strictly reduce the optimal number, and then present a heuristic algorithm for broadcast path assignment to minimize converters under the new model.