Routing and Wavelength Assignment of Static Manycast Demands Over All-Optical Wavelength-Routed WDM Networks

In this paper we present the static manycast routing and wavelength assignment (MA-RWA) problem along with heuristics and an integer linear program (ILP) to solve it. Manycast is a point-to-multipoint communication paradigm with applications in e-Science, Grid, and cloud computing. A manycast request specifies a candidate set of destinations, of which a subset must be reached. To solve MA-RWA, a light-tree must be assigned to each manycast request in a static set such that the number of wavelengths required is minimized. We present two heuristics, the shortest path heuristic (SPT) and the lambda path heuristic (LPH), a tabu search meta-heuristic (TS), and an ILP formulation. We show that TS provides results close to the optimal solution (from the ILP) for small networks. We then show that TS provides a 10% improvement over LPH and a 30%-40% improvement over SPT for various realistic networks.