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Hypercube sandwich approach to conferencing

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Abstract

This paper presents a novel cascaded conference network that provides distributed processing and signal transmission among members of disjoint sets of generic send/receive devices called conferees. It assumes an online request model in which idle groups of conferees may request the formation of a conference interconnection. Once a conference is established, all conferees remain connected until the entire conference is dissolved. The Hypercube Sandwich Network (HSN) consists of two components. A bidirectional permutation network is used for routing purposes to and from a hypercube of special processing elements for the purpose of conference formation. The HSN achieves strictly nonblocking performance for N conferees using O(N√log N) processing elements, and this is shown to be tight to within a log 1/4 N factor. Previous constructions required a quadratic number of processing elements for strictly nonblocking performance or could only provide wide-sense nonblocking conferencing. If the stronger requirement is made that the communication delay is logarithmic in the conference size, a simple algorithm is presented for wide-sense nonblocking conferencing in an HSN with O(N log N) processing elements.

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Houlahan, J.F., Cowen, L.J. & Masson, G.M. Hypercube sandwich approach to conferencing. J Supercomput 10, 271–283 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00130110

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