A cost-effective construction for WDM multicast switching networks

Multicast, or one-to-many, communication is one of the most important collective communication operations. Current trends in networking applications indicate that there will be an increasing demand in future networks for multicast. In particular, as wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) networks emerge, supporting multicast at the WDM layer becomes an important yet challenging topic. In this paper, we consider the issue of supporting WDM multicasting in the widely-used three-stage Clos network. Our study demonstrates that the multistage construction with small degrees of limited wavelength conversion is a cost-effective design for WDM multicast switching networks.