Minimum cost multicast routing based on high utilization MC nodes suited to sparse-splitting optical networks

As the Internet traffic continues to grow exponentially, Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) networks with tera bps bandwidth per fiber naturally emerge as backbone for next generation optical Internet. In particular, much research regarding multicast services has progressed for connecting source to destination nodes efficiently because multicast demands are increasing. However, sparse-splitting networks are more realistic than fully-splitting ones, since multicast-capable cross-connectors are expensive. In this paper, a heuristic method to minimize the cost of a multicast tree based mainly on Multicast-Capable nodes in sparse-splitting networks is proposed. According to the results of comprehensive simulations and compared to the previous algorithms, the proposed algorithm provides performance improvement up to about 16% in terms of wavelength channel cost.