A Hybrid Multicast Scheduling Algorithm for Single-Hop WDM Networks

This paper shows that, for single-hop WDM networks, a multicast scheduling algorithm which always tries to partition a multicast transmission into multiple unicast or multicast transmissions may not always produce lower mean packet delay than a multicast scheduling algorithm which does not partition multicast transmissions. The performance of a multicast scheduling algorithm may depend on the traffic conditions and the availability of the channel resource in the network. A hybrid multicast scheduling algorithm that can produce good performance for wide ranges of the traffic conditions and the availability of the channel resource in the network is proposed. Depending on the average utilizations of the data channels and the receivers, the proposed hybrid multicast scheduling algorithm dynamically chooses to employ a multicast scheduling algorithm which always tries to partition multicast transmissions or a multicast scheduling algorithm which does not partition multicast transmissions. Extensive simulations are performed to study the performance of the proposed hybrid algorithm. Our simulation results show that the proposed hybrid algorithm produces lower mean packet delay for wide ranges of the load, the maximum multicast group size, the percentage of unicast traffic, and the number of data channels in the network compared with a multicast scheduling algorithm which always tries to partition multicast transmissions and a multicast scheduling which does not partition multicast transmissions. Keywords—Single-hop WDM networks, multicast scheduling, star coupler