Abstract: Wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) has been becoming a promising solution to meet the rapidly growing demands on bandwidth. Multicast in WDM networks by employing free wavelength is an efficient approach to saving bandwidth and cost. However, the free wavelength may not identical between different hops in a multicast light-path, particularly in heavy load optical WDM networks. In order to implement multicast applications efficiently, a network coding (NC) technique was introduced into all-optical WDM multicast networks to solve wavelength collision problem between the multicast request and the unicast request. Compared with the wavelength conversion based optical multicast, the network coding based optical multicast can achieve better multicast performance with paying lower cost.

Key words: NC, all-optical multicast, WDM networks, wavelength conversion