Accelerating a Bellman-Ford routing algorithm using GPU

Abstract

This paper presents a graphics processing unit (GPU)-based implementation of the Bellman-Ford (BF) routing algorithm used in distance-vector routing protocols. In the proposed GPU-based approach, multiple threads concurrently run in numerous streaming processors in the GPU to update the routing information instead of computing the individual vertex distances one-by-one, where an individual vertex distance is considered as a single thread. This paper compares the performance and energy consumption of the GPU-based approach with those of the equivalent central processing unit (CPU) implementation for varying the number of vertices. Experiment results show that the proposed approach outperforms the equivalent sequential CPU implementation in terms of execution time by exploiting massive parallelism inherent in the BF routing algorithm.