Optical Amplifiers Placement in WDM Mesh Networks for Optical Multicasting Service Support

The problem of placing optical amplifiers (OAs) in wavelength-routing mesh networks has been studied in the literature in two contexts: network provisioning and connections provisioning. In this paper, we introduce optimal and heuristic solutions for the network provisioning problem. The solution is based on constructing a multicast forest for each multicast connection with the goal of minimizing the total number of OAs needed in the network, hence reducing its cost. The optimal solution is formulated as a mixed integer linear program (MILP). On the other hand, the heuristic solution is obtained by dividing the problem into subproblems and solving them separately while taking the interdependency between these subproblems into consideration. The results obtained from both solutions are compared and they are found to be a good match.