Multicast routing and wavelength assignment with delay constraint in WDM networks with sparse wavelength conversions

With the developments in multimedia and other real-time group applications, the question of how to establish multicast trees satisfying Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements is becoming a very important problem. In this paper, multicast routing and wavelength assignment with delay constraint (MCRWA-DC) in wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) networks with sparse wavelength conversions is studied. We propose a colored multigraph model for the temporarily available wavelengths. Based on this colored multigraph model, two heuristic algorithms are proposed to solve the MCRWA-DC problem. The proposed algorithms have the following advantages:(1) finish multicast routing and wavelength assignment in one step; (2) the total cost of the multicast tree is low; (3) the delay from the source node to any multicast destination node is bounded; and (4) locally minimize the number of wavelength conversions and the number of different wavelengths used to satisfy a multicast request. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithms work well and achieve satisfactory blocking probability.