Multicast communication in a class of rearrangeable optical WDM networks

Multicast is the ability to transmit information from a single source node to multiple destination nodes. Current trends in networking applications indicate that there will be an increasing demand in future networks for multicast. In this paper, we study multicast communication in a class of optical WDM networks with direct interconnects under some commonly used routing algorithms. We formalize multicast communication patterns by the maximum fanout of a source node, and obtain the necessary and sufficient conditions on the minimum number of wavelengths required for a network to be rearrangeable for arbitrary multicast communication. We give general results covering various multicast communication patterns from permutation to broadcast in rings, linear arrays, meshes, and hypercubes.