Message latency in hypercubic computer networks with the bursty traffic pattern

Abstract An interconnection network is a crucial component of parallel computers because the overall system performance is very sensitive to the latency of messages delivered by the network to communicate among collaborating processors. This paper presents an analytical performance model to calculate message latency in circuit-switched hypercubic networks in the presence of bursty traffic pattern, which is a typical scenario for multimedia applications. A message in circuit switching may need a number of connection attempts before successfully setting up a path from source to destination. The proposed model uses the approach of superposing infinite bursty traffic streams to capture the effective traffic entering the network from a source node, which includes the traffic generated by the source and those due to many connection attempts. Results obtained from simulation experiments confirm that the proposed model exhibits a good degree of accuracy for various network sizes and under different operating conditions.