Segment-based protection of multicast connections in metropolitan area optical networks with quality-of-transmission considerations

This paper investigates the problem of protecting multicast sessions in optical networks utilizing a novel segment-based protection heuristic algorithm called LP (level protection). The proposed scheme exhibits improved performance in terms of blocking probability compared to other traditional segment-based multicast protection schemes, especially when sharing techniques are also utilized. Furthermore, when physical layer impairments are also taken into account for the calculation of the working and protection light-trees, it is shown that the LP technique presents significant improvement in performance compared to the other commonly used protection techniques.