Fault-tolerant multicasting in multistage interconnection networks

We study fault-tolerant multicasting in multistage interconnection networks (MINs) for constructing large-scale multicomputers. In addition to point-to-point routing among processor nodes, efficient multicasting is critical to the performance of multicomputers. This paper presents a new approach to provide fault-tolerant multicasting, which employs the restricted header encoding schemes. The proposed approach is based on a recursive scheme in order to send a multicast packet to the desired destinations detouring faulty element(s). In the proposed fault-tolerant multicasting, a multicast packet is routed to its own destinations in only two passes through the MIN having a number of faulty elements by exploiting its nonblocking property.