A heuristic algorithm for multicast routing in sparse-splitting optical WDM networks

Multicast routing in optical WDM networks is investigated in the current paper in the presence of optical splitters only at a fraction of the network nodes. This work presents a novel multicast routing algorithm for sparse-splitting networks that is specifically designed for this category of networks. The proposed algorithm is compared with the most efficient multicast routing algorithms for sparse networks that are found in the literature through examples and simulations. Performance results show that the proposed approach achieves an important reduction on the average cost of the calculated multicasting trees, compared to the existing heuristics.