Energy-efficient multicast traffic grooming strategy based on light-tree splitting for elastic optical networks

In order to address the problem of optimizing the spectrum resources and power consumption in elastic optical networks (EONs), we investigate the potential gains by jointly employing the light-tree splitting and traffic grooming for multicast requests. An energy-efficient multicast traffic grooming strategy based on light-tree splitting (EED-MTGS-LS) is proposed in this paper. Firstly, we design a traffic pre-processing mechanism to decide the multicast requests' routing order, which considers the request's bandwidth requirement and physical hops synthetically. Then, by dividing a light-tree to some sub-light-trees and grooming the request to these sub-light-trees, the light-tree sharing ratios of multicast requests can be improved. What's more, a priority scheduling vector is constructed, which aims to improve the success rate of spectrum assignment for grooming requests. Finally, a grooming strategy is designed to optimize the total power consumption by reducing the use of transponders and IP routers during routing. Simulation results show that the proposed strategy can significantly improve the spectrum utilization and save the power consumption.