A New Self-Routing Multicast Network

In this paper, we propose a design for a new self-routing multicast network which can realize arbitrary multicast assignments between its inputs and outputs without any blocking. The network design uses a recursive decomposition approach and is based on the binary radix sorting concept. All functional components of the network are reverse banyan networks. Specifically, the new multicast network is recursively constructed by cascading a binary splitting network and two half-size multicast networks. The binary splitting network, in turn, consists of two recursively constructed reverse banyan networks. The first reverse banyan network serves as a scatter network and the second reverse banyan network serves as a quasisorting network. The advantage of this approach is to provide a way to self-route multicast assignments through the network and a possibility to reuse part of network to reduce the network cost. The new multicast network we design is compared favorably with the previously proposed multicast networks. It uses O(n log/sup 2/ n) logic gates, and has O(log/sup 2/ n) depth and O(log/sup 2/ n) routing time where the unit of time is a gate delay. By reusing part of the network, the feedback implementation of the network can further reduce the network cost to O(n log n).