A new design for wide-sense nonblocking multicast switching networks

In this paper, we propose a new design for a wide-sense nonblocking multicast switching network, which has many comparable properties to a strictly nonblocking Clos permutation network. For a newly designed four-stage N/spl times/N multicast network, its hardware cost, in terms of the number of crosspoints, is about 2(3+2/spl radic/2)N/sup 3/2/=11.66N/sup 3/2/, which is only a small constant factor higher than that of a three-stage nonblocking permutation network, and is lower than the O(N/sup 3/2/(logN/loglogN)) hardware cost of the well-known three-stage wide-sense nonblocking multicast network. In addition, the proposed four-stage nonblocking multicast network has a very simple routing algorithm with sublinear time complexity, and does not require multicast capability for the switch modules in the input stage.