Performance of a parallel-plane switching network

The design and evaluation of a parallel-plane interconnection network are presented in this paper. The proposed network can be used in data networks as well as in distributed computing systems. The proposed network is a cyclic, deflection-routing based, and hierarchical network and is constructed recursively using the Manhattan-type topology as the basic building block. This network exhibits substantial improvement in performance over its building block two-dimensional network on characteristics such as throughput and fault tolerance and still preserves the ease of implementation. The simulation and analysis in this paper show that the proposed network performs comparably to the hypercube at a much lower cost, even a larger network is used. Unlike other switching networks that use a higher node degree to maintain a small network diameter as the networks grow, the proposed parallel architecture network takes advantage of the expandability in its basic building blocks. This feature of the parallel-plane network offers a low network diameter, while it maintains a fixed and small node degree.