(A) study on multicast algorithms in multistage interconnection networks

Abstract

As multimedia services including video, voice, and data communications are increasing, the broadband integrated services digital network(B-ISDN), as an infrastructure of future networks to enable multimedia services, has been intensively studied. Many of multimedia services require multicast communications in addition to conventional point-to-point communications. Multicast communication which the same message is delivered from a source to an arbitrary number of destinations, is fundamental in supporting communication primitives including terrestrial broadcasting,teleconferencing, and video-on-demand (VOD) services in B-ISDN environments. On the other hand, multicast in multicomputer systems is a fundamental operation in several applications including data replication,barrier synchronization,and protocol for cache coherence in order to implement distributed shared-memory systems. Multistage interconnection networks (MINs) are a popular class for constructing the internal architecture of the asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) switch which was accepted as the switching and transmission technique to support B-ISDN services and the interconnection architecture of multicomputer systems. Many of the ATM switches and multicomputers based on MINs are proposed,such as the Synoptics Communications Lattiscell, the DEC GIGAswitch,Phoenix switch, the IBM SP-1 / SP-2, and the NEC Cenju-3. As the number of inputs/outputs in the MIN-based system increases,the total communication bandwidth and processing capability of the system as scale up as well.There are two alternative approaches to support multicast connections in the MIN-based systems. The first is to add a copy network at the front of a routing network,which replicates the cell to obtain the number of copies requested by a given multicast connection. Those copies will be transmitted through the routing network to the desired destinations. Instead of designing the copy network which additional hardware is required,the seco...