Multicasting in a linear lightwave network

Dynamic routing algorithms are proposed for setting up multicast connections in a linear lightwave network (LLN). The problem of finding a physical path for the multicast connection so as to satisfy all the constraints in the LLN is shown to be NP-complete, and a heuristic approach is presented. An algorithm is presented that decomposes the LLN into edge disjoint trees with at least one spanning tree. A multicast call is allocated a physical path on one of the trees, using the smallest component tree (SCT) or the minimum interference tree (MIT) criterion. Finally, the call is allocated the least used channel from among channels that can be allocated to it. The best performance (low blocking probability) is obtained when the LLN is decomposed into many spanning trees, each of them having a small diameter. It is also found that the selection of trees for each call using the MIT criterion exhibits better performance than with the SCT criterion.