Multicast scheduling is an important factor that affects the throughput of optical multicast packet-switching nodes.As the present optical multicast scheduling algorithms discard all the blocked source multicast packets in a "one-shot" model

this paper presents a new algorithm that supports fan-out splitting on the basis of the optical packet switching architecture with limited wavelength converters shared by all the nodes.This algorithm effectively improves the utilization rates of the port resources by randomly discarding the blocked multicast packets replicated in the source node.Simulation results show that compared with the existing algorithms

this algorithm significantly increases the throughput of the optical multicast packet-switched nodes.