QoS-Based Manycasting Over Optical Burst-Switched (OBS) Networks

Many distributed applications require a group of destinations to be coordinated with a single source. Multicasting is a communication paradigm to implement these distributed applications. However in multicasting, if at least one of the members in the group cannot satisfy the service requirement of the application, the multicast request is said to be blocked. On the contrary in manycasting, destinations can join or leave the group, depending on whether it satisfies the service requirement or not. This dynamic membership based destination group decreases request blocking. We study the behavior of manycasting over optical burst-switched networks (OBS) based on multiple quality of service (QoS) constraints. These multiple constraints can be in the form of physical-layer impairments, transmission delay, and reliability of the link. Each application requires its own QoS threshold attributes. Destinations qualify only if they satisfy the required QoS constraints set up by the application. We have developed a mathematical model based on lattice algebra for this multiconstraint problem. Due to multiple constraints, burst blocking could be high. We propose two algorithms to minimize request blocking for the multiconstrained manycast (MCM) problem. Using extensive simulation results, we have calculated the average request blocking for the proposed algorithms. Our simulation results show that MCM-shortest path tree (MCM-SPT) algorithm performs better than MCM-dynamic membership (MCM-DM) for delay constrained services and real-time service, where as data services can be better provisioned using MCM-DM algorithm.