An optical multicast packet switching architecture shared with limited-range multi-wavelength converter and full-range wavelength converters

Optical packet switch with multicast capability can inspire a broad range of multipoint to multipoint applications in future optical networks. An optical multicast packet switching architecture, equipped with feedback shared small number of limited-range multi-wavelength converters (LMWCs) and output shared some full-range wavelength converters (FRWCs), is proposed for a wavelength-division multiplexed optical multicast network to improve multicast performance in the paper. The FRWCs are used to overcome the performance degradation in terms of packet loss probability due to only use LMWCs. In the architecture, the two converters are shared by all the multicast packets importing to the optical multicast switch node. A maximum bipartite matching with minimum edges weights strategy was designed to employ fewer wavelength converters and avoid useless degradation of optical signal quality for the architecture to improve the node performance. The simulation results show that the proposed architecture and its wavelength converter scheduling algorithm can reduce the multicast packet loss probability with relatively lesser wavelength conversion cost.