Minimal contention-free matrices with application to multicasting

In this paper, we show that the multicast problem in trees can be expressed in term of arranging rows and columns of boolean matrices. Given a $p \times q$ matrix $M$ with 0-1 entries, the {\em shadow} of $M$ is defined as a boolean vector $x$ of $q$ entries such that $x_i=0$ if and only if there is no 1-entry in the $i$th column of $M$, and $x_i=1$ otherwise. (The shadow $x$ can also be seen as the binary expression of the integer $x=\sum_{i=1}^{q}x_i 2^{q-i}$. Similarly, every row of $M$ can be seen as the binary expression of an integer.) According to this formalism, the key for solving a multicast problem in trees is shown to be the following. Given a $p \times q$ matrix $M$ with 0-1 entries, finding a matrix $M^*$ such that: 1- $M^*$ has at most one 1-entry per column; 2- every row $r$ of $M^*$ (viewed as the binary expression of an integer) is larger than the corresponding row $r$ of $M$, $1 \leq r \leq p$; and 3- the shadow of $M^*$ (viewed as an integer) is minimum. We show that there is an $O(q(p+q))$ algorithm that returns $M^*$ for any $p \times q$ boolean matrix $M$. The application of this result is the following: Given a {\em directed} tree $T$ whose arcs are oriented from the root toward the leaves, and a subset of nodes $D$, there exists a polynomial-time algorithm that computes an optimal multicast protocol from the root to all nodes of $D$ in the all-port line model.Peer Reviewe