A Cost-Effective Approach to Deadlock Handling in Wormhole Networks

Wormhole networks have traditionally used deadlock avoidance strategies. More recently, deadlock recovery strategies have begun to gain acceptance. In particular, progressive deadlock recovery techniques allocate a few dedicated resources to quickly deliver deadlocked packets. Deadlock recovery is based on the assumption that deadlocks are rare; otherwise, recovery techniques are not efficient. Measurements of deadlock occurrence frequency show that deadlocks are highly unlikely when enough routing freedom is provided. However, networks are more prone to deadlocks when the network is close to or beyond saturation, causing some network performance degradation. Similar performance degradation behavior at saturation was also observed in networks using deadlock avoidance strategies. In this paper, we take a different approach to handling deadlocks and performance degradation. We propose the use of an injection limitation mechanism that prevents performance degradation near the saturation point and, at the same time, reduces the probability of deadlock to negligible values. We also propose an improved deadlock detection mechanism that uses only local information, detects all deadlocks, and considerably reduces the probability of false deadlock detection over previous proposals. In the rare case when impending deadlock is detected, our proposal consists of using a simple recovery technique that absorbs the deadlocked message at the current node and later reinjects it for continued routing toward its destination. Performance evaluation results show that our new approach to handling deadlock is more efficient than previously proposed techniques.