Towards a scalable broadcast in wormhole-switched mesh networks

Broadcast algorithms for wormhole-switched meshes have been widely reported in the literature. However, most of these algorithms handle broadcast in a sequential manner and do not scale well with the network size. As a consequence, many parallel applications cannot be efficiently supported using existing algorithms. Motivated by these observations, this paper presents a new broadcast algorithm based on our previously proposed Coded Path Routing (or CPR for short) [1]. The main feature of the proposed algorithm lies in its ability to perform broadcast operations with a high degree of parallelism. Furthermore, its performance is insensitive to the network size, i.e., only two message-passing steps are required to implement a broadcast operation irrespective of the network size. Results from a comparative analysis reveal that the new algorithm exhibits superior performance characteristics over those of the well-known Recursive Doubling, Extending Dominating Node and Network Partitioning algorithms.