The chaos router: a practical application of randomization in network routing

We present the chaos router, an asynchronous adaptive router, which under certain circumstances can send messages farther from their destinations. The chaos router greatly simplifies the routing logic by removing the livelock protection of previous schemes. Through an effective use of randomness, whose sources include that due to the adaptively processed load, the natural timing differences of selftimed circuitry and explicitly injected randomization, the chaos router avoids long message routes with high probability. In this paper the router is described, it is argued that the chaos router is deadlock free and probabilistically live-lock and starvation free, and simulation results are presented showing that the chaos router performs well.