Bandwidth-efficient dynamic tree-shared multicast in optical burst-switched networks

We study three multicast schemes, namely separate multicasting (S-MCAST), multiple uni-casting (M-UCAST), and tree-share multicasting (TS-MCAST), in optical burst-switched WDM networks taking into consideration the overheads due to control packets and guard band (GBs) of bursts on separate channels (wavelengths). In TS-MCAST, we describe four tree sharing strategies based on equal coverage (EC), super coverage (SC), overlapping coverage (OC) and overlapping coverage by maximization (OC-MAX) for deciding which multicast sessions should mix their multicast traffic, and also consider an algorithm to construct shared trees (STs). Jeong, Xiong, Cankaya, Vandenhoute and Qiao (see Proc. of IEEE ICC 2000, p.1289-91, 2000) proposed the tree sharing strategies and reported the performance of three multicast schemes for static multicast sessions and membership. In this paper, we propose efficient heuristic algorithms for managing dynamic sessions and memberships under the TS-MCAST scheme, and evaluate the efficiency of the heuristic algorithms and compare the TS-MCAST scheme with the other two schemes in terms of the bandwidth consumed and processing load assuming an unlimited bandwidth.