Local hot spot control with bypassing for multistage interconnection networks

Multistage interconnection network (MIN) is one of the most efficient interconnection architectures for parallel processing. However, when the traffic requirement between nodes at two sides of the MIN is not uniform, the network performance degrades significantly due to congestion. This paper proposes a scheme which can effectively avoid the congestion problem and achieve a consistently high performance for both the uniform and nonuniform traffic. This is accomplished by blocking the potential hot spot requests in each switch node while allowing uniform traffic to proceed to the next stages. Computer simulation reveals that the authors scheme achieves a substantial performance improvement compared to the regular MIN for a wide range of practical traffic conditions. It also requires very simple switch structure of buffer size two.<<ETX>>