On multicast traffic grooming in WDM networks

We investigate the problem of grooming dynamic multicast traffic in WDM mesh networks. This problem is equivalent to designing a light-tree based logical topology for multicast streams. It consists of four subproblems, namely routing, wavelength assignment, design of a light-tree based logical topology, and traffic-grooming. We develop different routing schemes to efficiently groom low-speed connections on the light-tree based logical topology. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed approaches use the network resources more efficiently compared to the nongrooming approach and the approach of serving the multicast requests as separate unicast requests. Moreover, amongst the proposed techniques, the logical-first multihop grooming scheme MC-MHl outperforms all other schemes in terms of blocking probability and performance gain.