A Conference Network for Group Communications Based on Multistage Interconnection Networks

A conference refers to a group of members in a network: which communicate with each other within the group. In this paper, we study the construct of a conferencing server based on multistage interconnection networks which supports the simultaneous transmission of processed messages among conference participants. That is, we investigate the ability of multistage interconnection networks to support the conferences. Since multicasting and routing schemes in the networks have been developed, multistage interconnection networks can be used as a conferencing server. The key point to investigate is the trade off between the communication delay and the hardware cost. The superiority of this scheme is of no use to arbiters. The hardware cost required in this scheme is O(nlogn) for an ntimesn conference network. In order to evaluate the communication delay, performance evaluations are conducted in the networks which serve several kinds of groups, where n=16, 32, and 64. The performance results show that the total number of required cycles goes over n as the load factor is close at 1