A Performance Study of Path Based Multicast Communication Algorithms

Multicast communication´s history has been driven by many schemes; however, a few have shown their efficiency on interconnection networks. Among these schemes, path based multicast has been proven to be more efficient in handling multicast, than those classified either as unicast based or tree-based schemes. This paper, therefore, focuses on path based scheme, examining some well-known path-based algorithms. Many experiments have been conducted to evaluate these algorithms in various operating scenarios and traffic conditions. The relative strengths, weaknesses and applicability of each algorithm to diverse situations are discussed. Our results have shown the superiority of our proposed QG algorithms against some of the well know multicast algorithms