A DYNAMIC SCHEDULING COMMUNICATION PROTOCOL AND ITS ANALYSIS FOR HYPERCUBE NETWORKS

Abstract

We propose a new protocol for one-to-one communication in multiprocessor networks, which we call the Dynamic Scheduling Communication (or DSC) protocol. In the DSC protocol, the capacity of a link is partitioned into two channels: a data channel, used to transmit packets, and a control channel used to make reservations. We initially describe the DSC protocol and the data structures needed to implement it for a general network topology. We then analyze the steady-state throughput of the DSC protocol for random node-to-node communication in a hypercube topology. The analytical results obtained are in very close agreement with corresponding simulation results. For the hypercube topology, and under the same set of assumptions on the node architecture and the routing algorithm used, the DSC protocol is found to achieve higher throughput than packet switching, provided that the size of the network is sufficiently large. We also investigate the relationship between the achievable throughput and the fraction of network capacity dedicated to the control channel, and present a method to select this fraction so as to optimize throughput.