A survey of optical multicast over WDM networks

Multicast applications such as multimedia, medical imaging, digital audio and video conferencing are bandwidth-intensive. With the advance in optical technology providing abundant bandwidth, it is natural to extend the multicast concept to optical networks in order to gain enhanced performance. This paper provides a comprehensive review of optical multicast techniques, covering the main optical multicast concept, the optical multicast switches, the multicast over single-hop broadcast-and-select networks, the multicast over multi-hop wide area mesh networks, and the related challenging algorithms developed for multicast routing in the optical domain. q 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.