A theory of fault-tolerant routing in wormhole networks

Abstract

Fault-tolerant systems aim at providing continuous operations in the presence of faults. Multicomputers rely on an interconnection network between processors to support the message-passing mechanism. Therefore, the reliability of the interconnection network is very important for the reliability of the whole system. This paper analyzes the effective redundancy available in a wormhole network by combining connectivity and deadlock freedom. Redundancy is defined at the channel level. We propose a sufficient condition for channel redundancy, also computing the set of redundant channels. The redundancy level of the network is also defined, proposing a theorem that supplies its value. This theory is developed on top of our necessary and sufficient condition for deadlock-free adaptive routing. Finally, a fault-tolerant routing algorithm for n-dimensional meshes is proposed.