Optical multicast over wavelength-routed WDM networks: A survey

With the rapid development of optical networking technology, it is now a realizable technique to support point-to-multipoint connections directly on the optical layer, giving rise to optical multicast. The topic of optical multicast has attracted much enthusiasm in recent years for the reason that it will not only make full use of the abundant bandwidth provided by optical fibers, but also take full advantage of multicast over the traditional point-to-point connection approach. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of optical multicast over wavelength-routed WDM networks, covering the development of both data plane and control plane designs. In particular, we provide an up-to-date state-of-the-art review on the multicast routing and wavelength assignment problem. To the best of our knowledge, this is the most thorough and comprehensive review conducted so far on this topic in the literature.