Drop-and-reroute: A new flow control policy for adaptive wormhole routing

Abstract

Abstract Adaptive routing is one of the promising approaches to overcome the packet contention problem in the network using wormhole routing. We propose a new flow control policy, called drop-and-reroute, for adaptive wormhole routing and describe architectural supports and its operation. Drop-and-reroute flow control further exploits the adaptivity achieved by adaptive routing by allowing a blocked packet to be routed again in the preceding node. We also measure the effect of drop-and-reroute flow control on the network performance by extensive simulation. Our simulation results show that drop-and-reroute flow control considerably improves the network performance of the adaptive routing algorithm under nonuniform traffic patterns.