Nonblocking k-fold multicast networks

Multicast communication involves transmitting information from a single source to multiple destinations and is a requirement in high-performance networks. Current trends in networking applications indicate an increasing demand in future networks for multicast capability. Many multicast applications require not only multicast capability, but also predictable communication performance such as guaranteed multicast latency and bandwidth. In this paper, we present a design for a nonblocking k-fold multicast network, in which any destination node can be involved in up to k simultaneous multicast connections in a nonblocking manner. We also develop an efficient routing algorithm for the network. As can be seen, a k-fold multicast network has significantly lower network cost than that of k copies of ordinary 1-fold multicast networks and is a cost effective choice for supporting arbitrary multicast communication.