Partitioning message patterns for bundled omega networks

Considers a strategy for dealing with communication conflicts in omega networks. Specifically, the authors consider the problem of partitioning a set of conflicting messages into a minimum number of subsets, called rounds, each free of communication conflicts. In addition to standard omega networks, they consider this problem for a more general class of networks called bundled omega networks, where interconnection links in the network are replaced by bundles of wires. Although the partitioning problem has previously been considered in the literature, its computational complexity has remained open. The authors show that for a number of cases, the problem is NP-complete, but for certain special cases, it is solvable in polynomial time. In addition, they present a class of distributed, on-line heuristics for the problem. Finally, they give a lower bound of /spl Omega/(log N) on the performance ratio for one of these heuristics.< >