Multicast protection scheme based on Hamiltonian cycle in fault-tolerant optical mesh networks

The increase of multimedia service requirements results in the growing popularity of the multicast in Wavelength-Division Multiplexing (WDM) optical mesh networks. Multicast fault tolerance in WDM optical mesh networks is an important issue because failures caused by the traffic carried in WDM optical mesh networks may lead to huge data loss. Previous works have proposed multicast protection algorithms to address the single-fiber link failure dominant in current optical mesh networks. However, these existing algorithms are all mainly based on path protection or segment protection, which may lead to long restoration times and complicated protection switching procedures. This paper therefore proposes a new heuristic algorithm, called Enhanced Multicast Hamiltonian Cycle Protection (EMHCP), in which all working light-trees of multicast demands can be protected by a Hamiltonian cycle in the network. For each multicast demand, EMHCP computes a least-cost light-tree based on the presented link-cost function that considers load balancing and proper straddling link selection so that backup wavelengths on the Hamiltonian cycle can be reduced. Simulation results show that EMHCP can obtain significant performance improvement compared with the conventional algorithm.