Construction of light-trees for WDM multicasting under splitting capability constraints

Communication systems with all-optical multicasting have better performance than those using optical/electrical/optical conversion. Multicast protocols assume that all nodes in the network can forward the signal from one input to several outputs. Since fabrication of an optical switch with splitting capability is an expensive technology, there are few switches that are multicast capable. The heuristics designed for all-optical networks have to handle this limitation. We introduce a shortest path based forest algorithm for all-optical networks. We propose a post-processing algorithm to reduce the number of wavelengths needed. The effect of this post-processing algorithm is also examined in a well-known approach.