Constructing Euclidean minimum spanning trees and all nearest neighbors on reconfigurable meshes

A reconfigurable mesh, R-mesh for short, is a two-dimensional array of processors connected by a grid-shaped reconfigurable bus system. Each processor has four I/O ports that can be locally connected during execution of algorithms. This paper considers the d-dimensional Euclidean minimum spanning tree (EMST) and the all nearest neighbors (ANN) problem. Two results are reported. First, we show that a minimum spanning tree of n points in a fixed d-dimensional space can be constructed in O(1) time on a /spl radic/(n/sup 3/)/spl times//spl radic/(n/sup 3/) R-mesh. Second, all nearest neighbors of n points in a fixed d-dimensional space can be constructed in O(1) time on an n/spl times/n R-mesh. There is no previous O(1) time algorithm for the EMST problem; ours is the first such algorithm. A previous R-mesh algorithm exists for the two-dimensional ANN problem; we extend it to any d-dimensional space. Both of the proposed algorithms have a time complexity independent of n but growing with d. The time complexity is O(1) if d is a constant.