Evaluation of multicast schemes in optical burst-switched networks - The case with dynamic sessions

In this paper, we evaluate the performance of several multicast schemes in optical burst-switched WDM networks taking into accounts the overheads due to control packets and guard bands (GBs) of bursts on separate channels (wavelengths). A straightforward scheme is called Separate Multicasting (S-MCAST) where each source node constructs separate bursts for its multicast (per each multicast session) and unicast traffic. To reduce the overhead due to GBs (and control packets), one may piggyback the multicast traffic in bursts containing unicast traffic using a scheme called Multiple Unicasting (M-UCAST). The third scheme is called Tree-Shared Multicasting (TS-MCAST) whereby multicast traffic belonging to multiple multicast sessions can be mixed together in a burst, which is delivered via a shared multicast tree. In [1], we have evaluated several multicast schemes with static sessions at the flow level. In this paper, we perform a simple analysis for the multicast schemes and evaluate the performance of three multicast schemes, focusing on the case with dynamic sessions in terms of the link utilization, bandwidth consumption, blocking (loss) probability, goodput and the processing loads.