The bus-usage method for the analysis of reconfiguring networks algorithms

Reconfigurable networks have attracted increased attention recently, as an extremely strong parallel model which is realizable in hardware. The authors consider the basic problem of gathering information which is dispersed among the nodes of the network. They analyze the complexity of the problem on reconfigurable linear-arrays. The analysis introduces a novel criteria for the efficiency of reconfigurable network algorithms, namely the bus-usage. The bus-usage quantity measures the utilization of the network sub-buses by the algorithm. It is shown how this yields bounds on the algorithm run-time, by deriving a run-time to bus-usage trade-off