Resource Allocation and Multicast Routing Protocol for Optical WDM Networks

In traditional data networks, a multicast tree which is starting at the source is built with branches across all the destinations to admit a multicast session. In a highly dynamic and traffic changing environment, a routing and bandwidth allocation scheme has to be developed in the optical WDM networks. Without requiring detection of traffic changes in real time, the dynamic traffic will be routed with the quality-of-service (QoS) guarantees. In this paper, we propose to develop a Resource Allocation and Multicast Routing (RAMR) protocol. In this protocol, the incoming traffic is sent from the multicast source to a set of intermediate junction nodes and then, from the junction nodes to the final destinations. The traffic is distributed to the junction nodes in predetermined proportions that depend on the capacities of intermediate nodes. Bandwidth required for these paths depends on the ingress egress capacities, and the traffic split ratios. The traffic split ratio is determined by the arrival rate of ingress traffic and the capacity of intermediate junction nodes. By simulation, we show that our proposed protocol attains increased throughput and bandwidth utilization with reduced delay.