CONCURRENT ASYNCHRONOUS BROADCAST ON THE METANET

The problem solved in this work is how multiple nodes in a network wit h an arbitrary topology can broadcast concurrently, in an asynchronous manner, to all other nodes. Asynchronous means that the nodes do not coordinate their broadcast, and, therefore, it is possible that all no des will start to broadcast at the same time. Simultaneous broadcast b y many nodes can cause traffic congestion, which can result in a traff ic loss. The main property of the broadcast algorithms presented in th is work is that under any arbitrary broadcast pattern there will be no packet or cell loss due to internal traffic congestion. The routing m echanism used by the broadcast algorithm can be viewed as a Variant of deflection routing, which means that a node makes on-line routing dec isions based on the local flow of traffic (i.e., internal load conditi ons). Unlike other deflection techniques, the MetaNet routing is along a global sense of direction, which guarantees that packets will reach their destinations. Thus, we call this method convergence routing (pr evious deflection algorithms did not guarantee deterministic routing c onvergence, i.e., a cell/packet can be deflected indefinitely inside t he network). As a result of the convergence property, the deflection r outing used in this work is the only one with broadcast capability.