Multicast communication in multicomputer networks |
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Authors: | Lin X Ni LM |
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Affiliation: | Dept. of Comput. Sci., Michigan State Univ., East Lansing, MI; |
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Abstract: | Efficient routing of messages is a key to the performance of multicomputers. Multicast communication refers to the delivery of the same message from a source node to an arbitrary number of destination nodes. While multicast communication is highly demanded in many applications, most of the existing multicomputers do not directly support this service; rather it is indirectly supported by multiple one-to-one or broadcast communications, which result in more network traffic and a waste of system resources. The authors study routing evaluation criteria for multicast communication under different switching technologies. Multicast communication in multicomputers is formulated as a graph theoretical problem. Depending on the evaluation criteria and switching technologies, they study three optimal multicast communication problems, which are equivalent to the finding of the following three subgraphs: optimal multicast path, optimal multicast cycle, and minimal Steiner tree, where the interconnection of a multicomputer defines a host graph. They show that all these optimization problems are NP-complete for the popular 2D-mesh and hypercube host graphs. Heuristic multicast algorithms for these routing problems are proposed |
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