Performance analysis of optical multicast in a new switching structure

The emergence of new services demands multicast function in optical network. Because of the high cost and complex architecture of multicast capable (MC) node, splitter-sharing switch structure is introduced in which the light splitters are shared by all input signals. To accommodate to this situation, by extending resource ReSerVation protocol-traffic engineering (RSVP-TE) and open shortest path first-traffic engineering (OSPF-TE), a new optical multicast mechanism is provided and the signaling flow and its finite state machine model are given. At the same time, a multicast routing algorithm in splitter-sharing optical network and a changing link weight policy to balance network traffic are proposed. Simulations in NSFNET show no matter with or without wavelength converters, when the number of splitters is 25% of that demanded by traditional MC nodes, the multicast performance has been close to the ideal circumstance. Wavelength converters and changing link weight help much in improving the traffic performance when the number of splitters is adequate.