Impairment-aware multicast session provisioning in metro optical networks

This work investigates the problem of designing, engineering, and evaluating metropolitan area transparent optical networks for the provisioning of multicast sessions. Apart from finding the minimum-cost tree and using metrics on the physical performance of the system, namely the Q-factor, this work investigates different node architecture designs including architectures with active and passive splitters and architectures with different receiver and transmitter designs. Different network engineering approaches are also utilized and are used to ascertain whether a multicast connection should be admitted to the network. "Tree balancing techniques" are used for routing the multicast sessions, aiming at maximizing the multicast connections that can be admitted to the network.