Incorporating network coding to formulate multicast sessions in elastic optical networks

In this paper, we leverage the Set-Cover problem to design the multicast-capable routing, modulation and spectrum assignment (MC-RMSA) algorithms that utilizes network coding (NC) to achieve efficient service provisioning in flexible-grid elastic optical networks (EONs). We use a realistic network model that considers the physical impairments from both transmission and light-splitting, and propose to serve each multicast request with a light-forest that includes one or more light-graphs1 to improve spectrum efficiency. For each multicast request, the proposed algorithms firstly use a Set-Cover approach to select the destination subsets to cover all the destinations. Then, for each subset, we calculate the light-graph to cover all the destination in it. The proposed algorithms are evaluated with extensive simulations for dynamic service provisioning, and the simulation results indicate that they can achieve better performance on blocking probability than existing MC-RMSA algorithms.