Properties and performance of folded hypercubes

A new hypercube-type structure, the folded hypercube (FHC), which is basically a standard hypercube with some extra links established between its nodes, is proposed and analyzed. The hardware overhead is almost 1/n, n being the dimensionality of the hypercube, which is negligible for large n. For this new design, optimal routing algorithms are developed and proven to be remarkably more efficient than those of the conventional n-cube. For one-to-one communication, each node can reach any other node in the network in at most [n/2] hops (each hop corresponds to the traversal of a single link), as opposed to n hops in the standard hypercube. One-to-all communication (broadcasting) can also be performed in only [n/2] steps, yielding a 50% improvement in broadcasting time over that of the standard hypercube. All routing algorithms are simple and easy to implement. Correctness proofs for the algorithms are given. For the proposed architecture, communication parameters such as average distance, message traffic density, and communication time delay are derived. In addition, some fault tolerance capabilities of this architecture are quantified and compared to those of the standard cube. It is shown that this structure offers substantial improvement over existing hypercube-type networks in terms of the above-mentioned network parameters