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Abstract

An apparatus and method is described for multicasting an inlet data cell, received as part of a multicast request, through a self-routing multistage routing network. Two algorithms are disclosed which use at most three passes to perform any arbitrary multicast. In the first pass, data is usually routed from the source to a set of consecutive outputs. These outputs are used as inputs in the second pass for routing to the destination cubes, and in some cases, a third pass can be used to route the remaining cubes. Since these cubes constitute a partition of the original multicast set, the multicast is completed when each of the cubes has been successfully routed. The routing algorithms guarantee that those cubes used in each pass through the network do not have internal blocking. The criterion to select a multicast routing algorithm for a particular application is to keep a appropriate balance between the control simplicity, the number of passes and the number of internal links used by the algorithm.

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First Claim