Multicast Flow Aggregation in IP over Optical Networks

It is widely believed that IP over optical networks will be a major component of the next generation Internet However, it is not efficient to map a single multicast IP flow into one light-tree, since the bandwidth of an IP flow required is usually much less than that of a light-tree. In this paper, we study the problem of multicast flow aggregation (MFA) in the IP over optical two-layered networks under the overlay model, which can be defined as follows: given a set of head ends (i.e. optical multicasting sources), each of which can provide a set of contents (i.e. multicast IP flows) with different required transmission bandwidth, and a set of requested content at the access routers (i.e. optical multicasting destinations), find a set of light-trees as well as the optimal aggregation of multicast IP flows in each light-tree. We model MFA by a tri-partite graph with multiple criteria and show that the problem is NP-complete. Optimal solutions are designed by exploiting MFA to formulate an integer linear programming (ILP), with two parameters: the multicast receiving index alpha and the redundant transmitting index beta. We also propose a heuristic algorithm. Finally, we compare the performance of MFA for different combination of alpha and beta via experiments and show our heuristic algorithm is effective for large-scale network in numerical results