On the performance of broadcast algorithms in interconnection networks

Broadcast Communication is among the most primitive collective capabilities of any message passing network. Broadcast algorithms for the mesh have been widely reported in the literature. However, most existing algorithms have been studied within limited conditions, such as light traffic load and fixed network sizes. In other words, most of these algorithms have not been studied at different Quality of Service (QoS) levels. In contrast, this study examines the broadcast operation, taking into account the scalability, parallelism, a wide range of traffic loads through the propagation of broadcast messages. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to consider the issue of broadcast latency at both the network and node levels across different traffic loads. Results are shown from a comparative analysis confirming that the coded-path based broadcast algorithms exhibit superior performance characteristics over some existing algorithms.