Bandwidth-efficient dynamic tree-shared multicast in optical burst-switched networks

In this paper, we study three multicast schemes, namely Separate Multicasting (S-MCAST), Multiple Unicasting (M-UCAST), and Tree-Shared Multicasting (TS-MCAST), in optical burst-switched WDM networks taking into consideration the overheads due to control packets and guard bands (GBs) of bursts on separate channels (wavelengths). In TS-MCAST, we describe four tree sharing strategies based on Equal Coverage (EC), Super Coverage (SC), Overlapping Coverage (OC) and Overlapping Coverage by Maximization (OC-MAX) for deciding which multicast sessions should mix their multicast traffic, and also consider an algorithm to construct shared trees (STs). In [1], the tree sharing strategies are proposed and the performance of three multicast schemes for static multicast sessions and membership is reported. In this paper, we propose efficient heuristic algorithms for managing dynamic sessions and memberships under the TS-MCAST scheme, and evaluate the efficiency of the proposed heuristic algorithms and compare the TS-M CAST scheme with the other two schemes in terms of bandwidth consumed and processing load assuming the unlimited bandwidth.