Techniques to Support Multicast Traffic in Single-Hop WDM Optical Networks
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1998-04-13
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Many applications and telecommunications services in futurehigh-speed networks will require some form of multipointcommunication. The problems associated with providing network support formultipoint communication have been widely studied within anumber of different networking contexts.As current network technologies evolve to an all-optical, largely passive infrastructure, these problems takeon new significance and raise a number of challenging issuesthat require novel solutions.
We consider the problem of supporting multipoint communication at the media access control (MAC) layer of broadcast-and-select Wavelength Division Multiplexed (WDM) networks.In this environment, bandwidth consumption and channel utilization arise as two conflicting objectives in the design of scheduling algorithms for multicast traffic.We present a new technique for the transmission of multicast packets which is based on the concept of a virtual receiver. This is a set of physical receivers which behave identically in terms of tuning.We focus on the problem of optimally selecting the virtual receivers, and prove that it is NP-complete.We then present four heuristics of varying degrees of complexity for obtaining virtual receivers that provide a good balance between the two conflicting objectives.
The dynamic nature of multicast traffic could affect the balance obtained with the virtual receivers when the network conditions change.We study the sensitivity to changes of the virtual receiver sets and the cost associated with handling the changes.Also, the cost of three different approaches to handling the changes is analyzed.Finally, we study the performance of various strategies for scheduling a combined load of unicast and multicast traffic in a broadcast WDM network.Three different scheduling strategies are presented, namely: separate scheduling of unicast and multicast traffic, treating multicast traffic as a number of unicast messages, and treating unicast traffic as multicasts of size one.Performance is measured in terms of schedule length which directly affects both aggregate network throughput and average packet delay.
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PhD
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Computer Science
