Performance evaluation of unicast and multicast communication in three-dimensional mesh architectures

As the multicast communication is utilized commonly in various parallel applications, the performance can be significantly improved by supporting multicast operations at the hardware level. In this paper, we define several factors of efficiency for unicast/multicast communication such as average of unicast latency, average of maximum multicast latency and level of parallelism in 3D mesh NoCs. Then, we propose analytical models for measuring the efficiency factors of a method in unicast/multicast communication called vertical block partitioning.