Multidestination Communication Over Tunable-Receiver Single-Hop WDM Networks

The importance of computer applications and telecommunication services relying on eecient multi-destination communication is growing rapidly. It is now likely that a signiicant portion of the overall traac in future communication environments will be of the multi-destination type. At the same time, lightwave technology is emerging as a promising candidate for implementing the next generation of multiuser high-speed networks. In this paper we address the issue of providing eecient mechanisms for multi-destination communication over one class of lightwave WDM architectures, namely, single-hop networks with tunability provided only at the receiving side. We distinguish a number of multicast traac types, and we suggest, analyze, and optimize alternative broadcast/multicast approaches for each type. One of our major contributions is the development of a suite of adaptive multicast protocols which are simple to implement, and have good performance under changing multicast traac conditions.