Multicast-capable optical code label switching and its experimental demonstration

Optical multicasting employing wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) has a problem with scalability, because the number of multicast members may surpass the number of available wavelength paths. In contrast to the conventional connection-oriented approach, this paper proposes optical code (OC) label switching for multicast networking and experimentally demonstrates this approach. The enabling components are an OC label, on which multicast group information is mapped, and a multicast routing table implemented with a reconfigurable optical matrix switch. This approach mitigates the scarcity of wavelength resources, thus, providing scalable optical multicast networking.