Comparison of routing methods in optical multicast WDM ring networks

Multicast routing and wavelength assignment (MC-RWA) is an important issue when designing multicast WDM ring networks. Two heuristic multicast routing methods, minimum spanning tree (MST) and shortest path routing (SPT), have been studied extensively. However, the comparison of those two heuristics in terms of the number of required wavelengths is still an open issue because of the lack of efficient optimization methods for MC-RWA. In this paper, using a recently developed optimization algorithm, we compare the two multicast routing methods and optimal MC-RWA. The results show that SPT requires about 1-12% more wavelengths than MST. Moreover, the number of required wavelengths under MST routing is shown to be very close to that of the optimal solution.