HP AM - A DEADLOCK-FREE MULTICAST ROUTING ALGORITHM FOR IRREGULAR NETWORKS

Recently, networks of workstations (NOWs) with underling switch-based networks have been considered as a cost-effective alternative to massively parallel processors. This paper presents a new deadlock-free tree-based multicast algorithm, HP AM, for irregular networks. The HP AM is a virtual cut-through routing algorithm relies on the use of spanning trees. Based on the parent-children relation, HP AM assigns labels only to the nodes of the network. The source node selects a node represents the horizontal path ancestor (hpa) of all destinations in the multicast and attaches it to the packet during the transmission. The routing process of the HP AM algorithm consists of two steps, the first has a single-head worm and the second has a multi-head worm. The multicast message is first routed from the source node to the hpa. Once the message has arrived at the hpa, the head of the worm will need to split into a multi-head worm. The heads of the multi-head worms may split repeatedly in order to reach all of the destinations. The HP AM algorithm is compared with a previous algorithm. The results demonstrate that the HP AM algorithm performs better than the another algorithm.