Multicasting optical crossconnects with fault tolerance mechanism and wavelength routing in all-optical networks

Abstract

This paper proposes a multicasting and fault-tolerant optical crossconnect (MFOXC) architecture that can support multicasting and fault tolerance. First, a tap-based and two splitter-based MFOXC node architectures are presented for wavelength routed all-optical networks. Compared to the traditional optical crossconnect, the proposed MFOXC node not only has the advantage of multicast capability but also improves the capability of fault tolerance. It could be assigned to critical point in networks to improve the reliability and multicast performance. Furthermore, the communication patterns considered in our algorithms include three general types covering almost all current communication patterns. The MFOXC routing algorithms for point-topoint, multicast and multiple multicasts are presented. We also propose a fault model that is more complete than the existing ones by considering both the active and passive faults. In addition to the fault model, a corresponding restoration mechanism is also proposed.