Design and provisioning of survivable WDM mesh networks supporting multicast traffic

It has been widely recognized in the literature that it is imperative to protect light-tree-based multicast sessions against single link failures since a single fiber failure can disrupt the information dissemination to several destination nodes. We address the problem of the optimal design and provisioning of survivable wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) mesh networks supporting multicast traffic. We first propose a mathematical formulation, which turns out to be an integer linear programming (ILP), for provisioning a given set of multicast sessions on a given network topology at a globally optimal cost. Because the ILP formulation is computationally intensive and does not scale well for large problem sizes, we then propose a fast heuristic algorithm. When the set of multicast sessions is given a priori, the order in which we set up the multicast session is of paramount importance. We propose five schemes to determine this order. We also present numerical results to demonstrate the performance of the proposed algorithm and schemes.