Distributed connection management for real-time communication over wormhole-routed networks

Wormhole networks provide a very-high-speed communication medium that is well suited for a large number of bandwidth demanding applications. Unfortunately, the lack of buffering in the switches causes blocked packets to transiently monopolize arbitrary large portions of the network, thus making it difficult to give real-time guarantees when connections contend for communication links. We present an efficient, fully distributed admission control scheme for time-critical connections over wormhole networks. In comparison to a corresponding centralized scheme, such a distributed scheme offers advantages in terms of scalability and easy integration into hybrid networks. We compare this scheme to a centralized algorithm in a suite of simulation experiments and show that its performance is encouraging.