Physical impairment aware multicast routing heuristics

Need for efficient and reliable network transport technologies has led to the introduction of all optical networks and routing technologies. With the spreading of new, bandwidth consuming services, like 3D-TV, where multicast can be used and with the introduction of new technologies where the operators have the ability to fine tune nearly all the properties of the optical signals it gets more and more important to present a reliable, fast, easy to use heuristic for the problem of Physical Impairment Constrained Routing (PICR). Various papers have been written to solve this problem; however, none of them has proposed a joint solution for routing, wavelength assignment and physical constraints awareness together if there is only limited or no regeneration or splitting capability. Our goal in this paper is to fill in this gap by extending the Accumulative Shortest Path (ASP) and the Minimum Path Heuristic (MPH). We show, by simulations, the beneficial properties of our PICR aware low-level multicast heuristics against application level multicasting and routing methods that do not consider physical impairment at all.