Low-cost, delay-bounded point-to-multipoint communication to support multicasting over WDM networks

The confluence of technical advances and multimedia service needs is intensifying the need for high throughput and low latency. Future communication networks will face an increase in traffic driven by multimedia requirements with stringent delay and jitter requirements. Wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) optical networks have the potential for meeting these goals by offering unprecedented high bandwidth and low latency. One very important aspect of the emerging Internet services is the need to support multicasting. This is crucial if WDM networks were to play an efficient role in the next generation Internet. Multicasting in WDM networks supporting multimedia applications can be viewed as the process of taking a group communication request and selecting a multicast tree that satisfies the quality of service requirements, in terms of bandwidth and end-to-end delay, of the underlying application. In this paper, we present a new class of low-cost, bounded-delay multicast heuristics for WDM networks. The heuristics use various techniques to establish a tree of semi-lightpaths between a source and a group of destination nodes. The unique feature of these heuristics is that they decouple the cost of establishing the multicast tree from the delay incurred by data transmission due to light-wave conversion and processing at intermediate nodes along the transmission path. A simulation study shows the performance of the proposed heuristics. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.