Efficient multicasting and broadcasting in interconnection networks

Efficiency in broadcasting and multicasting in networks is a major issue. The traditional multicasting and broadcasting techniques do not extend well to wormhole networks and especially to a shared memory multiprocessor environment where the messages are short and need a very low communication overhead. We propose an efficient hardware algorithm for multicasting and broadcasting in a hypercube based shared memory multiprocessor. The method uses logically embedded hierarchical rings for multicasting. Simulation as well as analytical results are shown. The proposed technique can be extended to any network in which rings can be embedded. We reduce both the delays and storage overheads.