Serial-Mode Multicasting Scheme in the Optical Packet Switched Networks

Traditionally, researches of the multicasting in the all-optical networks are focused on the issues of the parallel-mode multicasting scheme (PM), which can produce multiple simultaneous copies of the optical signals by an optical power splitter or other devices. However, when all the copies exported simultaneously, since the conflicts of the optical signals during the process of switching are hardly to be avoided, it is quite difficult to guarantee that all of them can be transmitted successfully, especially when there is a high network load. In this paper, an all-optical serial-mode multicasting scheme (SM), which can be implemented in the packet-based all-optical networks, also refers to the optical packet switched networks (OPSN), is researched experimentally. With the experimental results, we discuss the limitations of this scheme. Then, with the computer simulations, we compare its performance with the PM scheme. A conclusion can be drawn that compared with the PM scheme, the SM scheme can increase the multicast success ratio and reduce the multicast retransmission times at the costs of some signal impairments and some extra transmission latency.