Comparison of Different Multicast Approaches in Elastic Optical Networks

Internet traffic is experiencing an enormous growth and increased demand for new services. To enhance flexibility and improved spectral efficiency of traditional WDM optical networks that use ITU-T fixed frequency grid, Elastic Optical Networks (EONs) have been proposed. Moreover, multicast services, including live Internet video delivery and inter-datacenter database synchronization, gain popularity, and they usually generate large volume of traffic. To address the growth of multicast services, we focus here on routing and spectrum allocation for the multicast traffic in EONs considering distance-adaptive transmission. For the accommodation of multicast traffic, existing studies focus on using light-tree and lightpath technologies while the light-trail technology was not considered for EONs. In this paper, we compare the effectiveness, in term of spectrum and transmitter usage, among light-trail, lightpath and the light-tree in multicast accommodation. We also evaluate, in EONs, the benefit of having distance-adaptive transmission for these approaches. Numerical results illustrate their performances for a range of cases.