Design and analysis of multicast communication in multidimensional mesh networks

Abstract

This paper addresses the issue of multicast communication in scalable interconnection networks, using path-based scheme. Most existing multicast algorithms either assume a fixed network size, low dimensional networks or only consider the latency at the network level. As a consequence, most of these algorithms implement multicast in a sequential manner and can not scale well with the network dimensions or the number of nodes involved. Furthermore, most of these algorithms handle multicast communication with low throughput. In this paper, we propose a multicast algorithm for multidimensional interconnection networks, which is built upon our Qualified Groups QG multicast scheme for ensuring efficient communication irrespective of the network sizes/dimensions or the number of the destination nodes. Unlike the existing works, this study considers the scalability and latency at both the network and node levels so as to achieve a high degree of parallelism. Our results show that the proposed algorithm considerably improves the multicast message delivery ratio, throughput and scalability. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.