Fault-tolerance of a MIN using hybrid redundancy

Abstract

The reliability of multistage interconnection networks (MINs) can be improved by making the networks more fault-tolerant. The fault-tolerance can be improved by either using hardware redundancy or time redundancy. Using hardware redundancy, the fault-tolerance of the MINs are limited by the cost since higher fault-tolerance results in higher cost. Using time redundancy, high fault-tolerance can be provided without an increase in the hardware but the performance of the system degrades drastically. Thus, to provide a compromise between cost and performance for a MIN, we propose hybrid redundancy/spl minus/a combination of hardware and time redundancies. In this paper, we present a reconfiguration algorithm for one-to-one and one-to-many connections of a MIN operating under faults that uses hybrid redundancy. We also present simulation results which show that the reliability of a MIN can be significantly improved by using hybrid redundancy without seriously hampering the performance of the network at no extra cost. >