Fault-tolerant wormhole routing algorithms for mesh networks

Abstract

We present simple methods to enhance the current minimal wormhole routing algorithms developed for high radix, low dimensional mesh networks for fault tolerant routing. We consider arbitrarily located faulty blocks and assume only local knowledge of faults. Messages are routed minimally when not blocked by faults and this constraint is relaxed to route around faults. The key concept we use is a fault ring consisting of fault free nodes and links can be formed around each fault region. Our fault tolerant techniques use these fault rings to route messages around fault regions. We show that, using just one extra virtual channel per physical channel, the well known e cube algorithm can be used to provide deadlock free routing in networks with nonoverlapping fault rings; there is no restriction on the number of faults. For the more complex faults with overlapping fault rings, four virtual channels are used. We also prove that at most four additional virtual channels are sufficient to make fully adaptive algorithms tolerant to multiple faulty blocks in n dimensional meshes. All these algorithms are deadlock and livelock free. Further, we present simulation results for the e cube and a fully adaptive algorithm fortified with our fault tolerant routing techniques and show that good performance may be obtained with as many as 10% links faulty. >