Node Architecture, Routing, And Traffic Grooming In Multicast-Capable Optical Networks

As various broadband applications keep surging, there rises an urgent requirement on data communication networks to efficiently deliver multicast traffic. Since next-generation optical transport network will automatically and transparently transport various kinds of traffic with different formats including IP, multicasting directly at the optical layer (optical multicasting) may be popular in next-generation optical networks.Optical multicasting related techniques in the lightpath-oriented optical network are investigated in the thesis. Such techniques are architecture design on multicast-capable optical cross-connect (MC-OXC), transmission impairments constraint multicast network design and transmission impairments aware multicast routing, optical multicasting in WDM ring, and optical multicast traffic grooming.In chapter 1, at first, we briefly analyze the multicasting requirements and characters of next-generation broadband data communication services. Next, we compare IP multicasting with optical multicasting. And then give a brief introduction on the state-of-art investigations in optical multicasting.Chapter 2 concerns on architecture design of the multicast-capable nodes. In comparison with the unicast optical cross-connects (OXCs), a multicast-capable optical cross-connect (MC-OXC) needs not only to implement signal copying but also to implement switching these copies to their output ports. Usually, the passive splitters are used to perform optical signal copy within the optical domain. Such splitters are simple and inexpensive, but have no wavelength conversion capability. Recently, there is a breakthrough on multiwavelength converters built on semiconductor optical...