A Fast Maximum Finding Algorithm on Broadcast Communication

In this paper, we propose a fast algorithm to solve the maximum finding problem under the broadcast communication model, such as an Ethernet. In our maximum finding algorithm, each processor holds one data element initially. The key point of our algorithm is to use broadcast conflicts to build broadcasting layers and then to distribute the data elements into those layers. Only those elements who are on the active layer and still alive can broadcast their values. Thus, the number of broadcast conflicts is reduced. Suppose that there are n input data elements and n available processors. We show that the average time complexity of our algorithm is Θ(log n), which is better than any previous result