Abstract—This paper addresses the one-to-all broadcasting problem and the one-to-many broadcasting problem, usually simply called broadcasting and multicasting, respectively. Broadcasting is the information dissemination problem in which a node of a network sends the same piece of information to all the other nodes. Multicasting is a partial broadcasting in the sense that only a subset of nodes forms the destination set. Both operations have many applications in parallel and distributed computing. In this paper, we study these problems in both line model, and cut-through model. The former assumes long distance calls between nonneighboring processors. The latter strengthens the line model by taking into account the use of a routing function. Long distance calls are possible in circuit-switched and wormhole-routed networks, and also in many networks supporting optical facilities.

In the line model, it is well known that one can compute in polynomial time a $\left\lceil {\log_2n} \right\rceil$-round broadcast or multicast protocol for any arbitrary network. Unfortunately, such a protocol is often inefficient from a practical point of view because it does not use the resources of the network in a balanced way. In this paper, we present a new algorithm to compute broadcast or multicast protocols. This algorithm applies under both line and cut-through models. Moreover, it returns protocols that efficiently use the bandwidth of the network. From a complexity point of view, we also show that most of the optimization problems relative to the maximization of the efficiency of broadcast or multicast protocols in terms of switching time or vertex load are NP-complete. We have, however, derived polynomial efficient solutions for tree-networks.