Multicasting with physical-layer constraints in metropolitan area networks

This paper investigates the problem of designing, engineering and evaluating metropolitan area transparent optical networks for the provisioning of multicast sessions. Apart from finding the minimum cost tree, our proposed technique utilizes a metric on the physical performance of the system, namely the Q-factor of the system, by calculating Q-penalties for impairments via a Q-budgeting approach, to investigate whether a multicast connection should be admitted to the network. It uses “tree balancing techniques” for the multicast sessions aiming at maximizing the multicast connections that can be admitted to the network.