Reliability Improvement of Fault-Tolerant Shuffle Exchange Interconnection Networks

Multistage interconnection networks (MINs) are used as a fast and efficient communication medium for interconnecting the elements of a multiprocessor system which mainly includes processors and memories. The reliability in these networks is an important aspect. In this paper, a new method is proposed to increase the reliability of fault-tolerant multistage interconnection networks which are based on shuffle exchange network (SEN) and shuffle exchange gamma interconnection network (SEGIN). In fact, by adding some extra multiplexers (MUX) and demultiplexers (DeMUX) in the first and last stages of these networks, the number of paths between each sourcedestination pair increases that results in higher reliability compared to previous networks. Moreover, theses extra modules construct a bypass path for each source or destination node that leads to decrease the single point of failure probability in comparison with the previous networks. The proposed networks are analyzed and evaluated compared to similar fault-tolerant networks based on the reliability aspects and hardware cost.