Wide-sense nonblocking multicast in a class of regular optical WDM networks

Multicast communication involves transmitting information from a single source node to multiple destination nodes, and is becoming an important requirement in high-performance networks. In this paper, we study multicast communication in a class of optical WDM networks with regular topologies such as linear arrays, rings, meshes, tori and hypercubes. For each type of network, we derive the necessary and sufficient conditions on the minimum number of wavelengths required for a WDM network to be wide-sense nonblocking for multicast communication under some commonly used routing algorithms.