Embedding Multicast Services in Optical Networks with Fanout Limitation

Network virtualization in optical networks enables the decoupling of network services from the underlying hardware infrastructure to allow multiple Virtual Optical Requests (VORs) sharing the same Substrate/physical Optical Network (SON). The challenge of mapping VORs onto the shared SON lies on how to efficiently allocate physical resource for the VORs, which is referred to as Virtual Optical Network Embedding (VONE). Many recent research focus on the NP-Hard VONE optimization problem. In this paper, for the first time, we explore how to efficiently map a given VOR for a multicast service onto a shared SON while considering the fanout (splitting/forwarding) limitation of the physical optical switches. We propose a novel algorithm, namely, Centrality-based Degree Bounded Shortest Path Tree (C-DB-SPT) to minimize the resource usage while satisfying the degree limitation in the shared SON. The experimental results show that the C-DB-SPT algorithm outperforms the traditional greedy-based algorithms as much as by 35% in terms of the total bandwidth consumption.