The impact of routing schemes on group communication throughput in scalable networks

Multicast communication has been a major avenue for many studies in interconnection networks. However, such a communication pattern has been studied under either limited operating conditions or within the context of deterministic routing algorithms. This paper investigates the impact of routing algorithms, both deterministic and adaptive routing on the multicast communication over interconnection network. In particular, we focus on the provision of efficient multicast communication algorithms in interconnection networks. Using detailed simulation experiments, different multicast algorithms have been compared for a range of system sizes, traffic loads, and destination nodes. For the case of multicast latency, our proposed algorithms exhibit the best performance when the traffic load is high and the start-up overhead does not dominates the propagation overhead. The results also highlight the impact of adaptive routing on both latency and throughput when designing efficient multicast algorithms. Thus, these results demonstrate significant potential to be applied to current and future generation interconnection networks.