Multicast communication in a class of wide-sense nonblocking optical WDM networks

Multicast communication involves transmitting information from a single source node to multiple destination nodes, and is becoming an important requirement in highperformance networks. In this paper, we study multicast communication in a class of optical WDM networks with direct interconnects such as linear arrays, rings, meshes, tori and hypercubes. For each type of network, we derive the necessary and sufficient conditions on the minimum number of wavelengths required for a net work to be wide-sense nonblocking for arbitrary multicast communication.