Abstract
A light trail is a unidirectional bus from a convener node to an end node, whose communication channel can be accessed at any intermediate node resulting in higher flexibility for multiplexing the traffic of multiple connections into the communication channel. The objective of dynamic multicast traffic grooming is to provision dynamically arriving multicast connections by using existing light trails or establishing new light trails such that request blocking ratio is reduced. An effective dynamic multicast traffic grooming algorithm is proposed based on a novel auxiliary graph model that remedies the drawbacks of auxiliary graph models used in previous works in the literature. The performance of the proposed algorithm is shown via simulations to yield significantly better performance than algorithms developed in previous works.