Communication-Prediction of Scouting Switching in Adaptively-Routed Torus Networks

The switching technique determines how messages are propagated from source to destination, and has a great impact on network performance. Traditional flow control mechanisms such as Wormhole Switching (WS) realize very good performance, but prone to deadlock in the vicinity of faults. While techniques such as adaptive routing can alleviate the problem, it cannot by itself solve the problem. This has motivated the development of different switching techniques. The Scouting Switching (SS) has been suggested as an efficient switching method for reconciling the conflicting demands of communication performance and fault-tolerance in computer networks. In this paper, we present a novel mathematical model to predict communication delay of SS coupled with virtual channels and fully adaptive routing in 2-D torus networks. We have carried out extensive simulation experiments, the results of which are used to validate the proposed analytical model.