Traffic Groomed Multicasting in Sparse-Splitting WDM Backbone Networks ⋆

Abstract. As the interest of the Internet multicasting increases, the huge portion of the future traffic in optical WDM networks is expected to be strongly related to multicast applications and thus the technology for grooming such traffics also becomes important. In this study, we investigate the problem of multicast traffic grooming in WDM optical mesh networks with sparse-splitting capability. The problem of constructing optimal multicast routing trees and grooming their traffics in WDM optical mesh networks is NP-hard. Therefore, we propose heuristic algorithms to solve the problem in an efficient manner. These reduce the link cost by constructing a minimal cost tree with multicast capable nodes and increase the traffic grooming effect based on the relationship of multicast sessions. Comprehensive simulation results demonstrate that the proposed schemes use the network resource more efficiently especially for link cost compared to the previous work [1] while maintaining the similar number of wavelengths. 1