Abstract
In this paper, we study the multicast communication in the self‐routing multistage interconnection network (MIN) for constructing asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) switch architectures. Many of these applications require multicast communications in addition to conventional point‐to‐point communications. Multicast communication which the same message is delivered from a source to an arbitrary number of destinations, is fundamental in supporting collective communication primitives including cable TV, teleconferencing, and video‐on‐demand services. This paper presents a novel approach to supporting multicast communication, on the basis of the restricted address encoding scheme which constructs a short fixed‐size multicast header and the recursive scheme that recycles a multicast packet one or more times through the network to reach at desired destinations. We also propose novel recursive multicast algorithms providing deadlock‐freedom in MIN‐based ATM switches. The emphasis is on evaluating the performance of these algorithms in terms of the number of recycling passes, the complexity of switching elements, and the number of links used. The proposed algorithms can be easily applicable to buffered MIN‐based ATM switches.