Shadi Jawhar, Bernard Cousin, and Samer Lahoud (2010)
Efficient Placement of Light Splitters for Heterogeneous Multicast Traffic in Optical Networks
In: High Capacity Optical Networks and Enabling Technologies (HONET), Cairo, Egypt, pages 204 - 209.
When multicasting in optical networks is implemented
within the switching control plane, it combines the
efficiency of multicast trees along with the high speed and
low delay of optical communications. Multicast nodes must
be equipped with light splitters. Light splitters are
expensive equipment. Therefore, a limited number of optical
nodes will have this splitting capability. A good placement
of optical splitters can increase the efficiency of the
multicast signaling and routing techniques on the one hand,
and reduce the number of splitters on the other hand. This
leads to faster multicast trees setting up, lower data
transmission delays, and less traffic on the network links;
thus saving of optical links capacity for other multicast
and unicast transmissions. In order to achieve efficient
multicasting in optical network, we propose to take into
account network characteristics i.e. link capacity and node
degree when placing the optical splitters. The benefits of
the smart placement of light splitters will be clearly
shown in heterogeneous optical networks, where multicast
traffic is not uniformly distributed over the network, and
optical links connecting different nodes in the network
have different characteristics.