Multicast Communication in Multicomputer Networks

  • Authors:
  • X. Lin;L. M. Ni

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems
  • Year:
  • 1993

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Abstract

Efficient routing of messages is a key to the performance of multicomputers. Multicastcommunication refers to the delivery of the same message from a source node to anarbitrary 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 broadcastcommunications, which result in more network traffic and a waste of system resources.The authors study routing evaluation criteria for multicast communication under differentswitching technologies. Multicast communication in multicomputers is formulated as agraph theoretical problem. Depending on the evaluation criteria and switchingtechnologies, they study three optimal multicast communication problems, which areequivalent 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.