Comparison of deflection and store-and-forward techniques in the Manhattan Street and Shuffle-Exchange Networks

The Manhattan Street Network (MS-Net) and Shuffle-Exchange Network (SX-Net) are two-connected networks with significantly different topologies. Fixed-size packets are transmitted between nodes in these networks. The nodes are synchronized so that all of the packets that are received by a node within a slot transmission time arrive at a switching point simultaneously. Instead of storing large numbers of packets at intermediate nodes, a deflection strategy similar to hot-potato routing is used. There are characteristics of the MS-Net that make it well suited for deflection routing. With no buffer, 55-70% of the throughput with an infinite number of buffers has been obtained; with a single buffer per node, the throughput increases to 80-90%. With uniform load the throughput does not decrease significantly as the network utilization increases. Therefore, additional flow control mechanisms are not required to achieve the highest network throughput. The SX-Net does not have the above characteristics of the MS-Net. However, deflection routing still provides a significant portion of the available throughput. In the SX-Net, more buffers are required than in the MS-Net, and a flow control mechanism must be used to achieve the greatest throughput.<>