Multicasting, the transmission of a packet to a group of hosts, is an important service for improving the efficiency and robustness of distributed systems and applications. Although multicast capability is available and widely used in local area networks, when those LANs are interconnected by store-and-forward routers, the multicast service is usually not offered across the resulting internetwork. To address this limitation, we specify extensions to two common internetwork routing algorithms-distance-vector routing and link-state routing-to support low-delay datagram multicasting beyond a single LAN. We also describe modifications to the single-spanning-tree routing algorithm commonly used by link-layer bridges, to reduce the costs of multicasting in large extended LANs. Finally, we discuss how the use of multicast scope control and hierarchical multicast routing allows the multicast service to scale up to large internetworks.

The Supercomputer SuperNet (SSN) is a two-level hierarchical high-speed network. The lower level is a High Speed Electronic mesh fabric; the higher level is a WDM optical backbone network interconnecting the high-speed fabrics distributed across a campus or metropolitan area. The salient characteristics of this architecture are the use of wormhole routing and backpressure hop-by-hop flow control mechanism. Because of these features, deadlocks are possible in SSN. In this paper, we address the issue of deadlock-free routing which is an essential prerequisite for the proper operation of SSN. To this end, we first present a deadlock free routing scheme for the WDM backbone which is implemented with a shufflenet multihop virtual topology. We use the notion of virtual channels to obtain mappings of virtual channels to physical channels such that deadlock-free routing is achieved for any (p; k) shufflenet (uni and bidirectional). Then, we compare the virtual channels scheme with the more con...

Abstract. A topology-aware network is a dynamic network in which the nodes can detect whether locally topology changes occur. Many modern networks, like IEEE 1394.1, are topology-aware networks. We present a distributed algorithm for computing and maintaining an arbitrary spanning tree in such a topology-aware network. Although usually minimal spanning trees are studied, in practice arbitrary spanning trees are often sufficient. Since our algorithm is not involved in the detection of topology changes, it performs better than the spanning tree algorithms in standards like IEEE 802.1. Because reasoning about distributed algorithms is rather tricky, we use a systematic approach to prove our algorithm. 1

With increasing demand for multimedia applications, local area network (LAN) technologies are rapidly being upgraded to provide support for quality of service (QoS). In a network that consists of an interconnection of multiple LANs via bridges, the QoS of a flow depends on the length of an end-to-end forwarding path. In the IEEE 802.1D standard for bridges, a spanning tree is built among the bridges for loop-free frame forwarding. Albeit simple, this approach does not support all-pair shortest paths. In this paper, we present a novel bridge protocol, the Spanning Tree Alternate Routing (STAR) Bridge Protocol, that attempts to find and forward frames over alternate paths that are provably shorter than their corresponding tree paths. Being backward compatible to IEEE 802.1D, our bridge protocol allows cost-effective performance enhancement of an existing extended LAN by incrementally replacing afewbridges in the extended LAN by the new STAR bridges. We develop a strategy to ascertain bridge locations for maximum performance gain. Our study shows that we can significantly improve the end-to-end performance when deploying our bridge protocol. 1.