| Wavelength-Division Multiplexed (WDM)-based optical transport networks, utilizing intelligent switches have emerged as the preferred architecture to accommodate the tremendous increase in traffic in todays networks. These networks need to provision high bandwidth sessions as well as a mixture of different types of sessions including unicast, multicast and groupcast.;Applications such as video on demand, multiparty conferencing, teaching via the web, grid computing, and other potential Internet applications will be the driving force behind the increase of multicast and groupcast traffic in the near future. For such applications to be viable, it is important that the mixture of unicast, multicast and groupcast traffic is routed efficiently through the optical network. To accommodate these trends, optical architectures with the capability to provision different types of services utilizing a number of intelligent optical cross-connect architectures have appeared in the forefront of optical networking technology.;The objective of this dissertation is to investigate problems associated with the provisioning of protected multicast sessions, as well as the network planning process and the provisioning of groupcast sessions. The primary contribution of this dissertation is a novel network protection technique for multicasting in optical networks, the proposal of planning processes for groupcast provisioning and novel heuristics for groupcast routing and wavelength assignment. Both static and dynamic traffic cases were considered and evaluated. Using optical cross-connects that supports only lightpath establishment and exist commercially today, the thesis proposes novel approaches on how to establish groupcast connections (light-forests). Moreover, using drop-and-continue architectures, "linear light-trees" are constructed that also serve groupcast sessions. Assuming maturing multicast node architectures, this work proposes provisioning and protection solutions for multicast sessions as well as provisioning of groupcast sessions.;This dissertation fills an existing void in that area by developing a solution for provisioning mixed services for the general case of networks with arbitrary mesh topologies. It formulates models and algorithms that can be implemented by the network designers during the set-up of the network, to guarantee the operation of the network for different mixtures of applications. |
