Using the Dual Path Property of Omega Networks to Obtain Conflict-Free Message Routing

A strategy for dealing with communication conflicts that occur in omega networks is presented. The strategy operates by implementing the dual path property of omega networks, which allows the source and destination processors to reverse roles for some of the messages that are being transmitted. For certain message patterns, such a reversal produces a modified message pattern for which the network routes are disjoint. For a circuit switching mode in which the network links and switches are bidirectional, the disjoint set of routes for modified message pattern can be used to achieve conflict-free message transmission for the original message pattern. This strategy is investigated, and an efficient algorithm to determine whether it can be successfully applied to a given message pattern is presented. >