Optical WDM networks and multicasting

Bandwidth usage increases day by day and the need for new technologies emerges for devoloping the efficiency. Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) is the most spectacular one of these presented network technologies to be able to use optical fibers. In addition to that, multicasting the network traffic also draws attention for ensuring the growing traffic demand. In multicasting, the transmission is performed between the source node and many destination nodes. The packet delivery is not accomplished by flooding or sending the copies of the packets, thus bandwidth capacity is used as ideally as possible. The packet is sent by the source to the network and the network forwards it to the corresponding destinations. Thus, the number of video conferencing, internet based education and stock information distribution like multicast service based applications gradually increase, in time. This type of point to multipoint transmissions need huge amount of bandwidth in the network and also an effective technology that will meet that drawback. To address these issues in this paper, we present a new protocol structure for multicasting with Optical Burst Switching (OBS) on WDM networks. In addition to this, the simulations are performed over unicast and multicast transmissions which are compared on Just-In-Time (JIT) and Just Enough Time (JET) reservation protocols.