Wavelength assignment for all-to-all broadcast in bidirectional WDM optical ring with limited drops

All-to-all broadcast is to disseminate a unique message from each node to every other node in a network. This problem is significant in the context of control plane design as it relates to status information dissemination. In this paper, a wavelength assignment method to reduce the number of wavelengths is proposed to establish all-to-all broadcast in a bidirectional WDM ring network. The network model is an all-optical network, in which a message from source node can be dropped (or split) only at a limited number of destination nodes along a light path due to power loss of dropping optical signals. An expression for the upper bound on the number of wavelengths required to support all-to-all broadcast is derived for certain cases of WDM ring while for other cases, an attractive algorithm is given to identify the lengths of connection sets that can be grouped together with suitable wavelength assignment strategies. Numerical results are computed to show that the results obtained are close to the lower bound.