Constrained multicast routing in WDM networks with sparse light splitting

As WDM technology matures and multicast applications become increasingly popular, supporting multicast at the WDM layer becomes an important and yet challenging topic. In this paper, we study constrained multicast routing in WDM networks with sparse light splitting, i.e. where some switches are incapable of splitting light (or copying data in the optical domain). Specifically, we propose four WDM multicast routing algorithms, namely, Re-route-to-Source, Re-route-to-Any, Member-First, and Member-Only. Given the network topology, multicast membership information, and light splitting capability of the switches, these algorithms construct a source-based multicast light-forest (consisting one or more multicast trees) for each multicast session. The performance of these algorithms are compared in terms of the average number of wavelengths used per forest (or multicast session), average number of branches involved (bandwidth) per forest as well as average number of hops encountered (delay) from a multicast source to a multicast member.