Performance comparison of deadlock recovery and deadlock avoidance routing algorithms in wormhole-switched networks

Dealing with deadlock has always been a crucial issue for any routing algorithms proposed for wormhole-switched networks. Adaptive routing algorithms, based on deadlock avoidance strategies, usually dedicate resources specifically to ensure deadlock freedom. However, a number of recent studies have demonstrated that deadlocks are quite rare in the network. This fact has motivated researchers to introduce adaptive routing algorithms based on deadlock recovery strategies. In an effort to gain a deep understanding of the factors that affect routing performance, a comparison of the performance merits of deadlock recovery against deadlock avoidance routing algorithms is performed. While most existing network evaluation studies have been based on software simulation, the present study is the first to use the analytical modelling approach to conduct the comparative analysis. The results reveal that in most cases deadlock recovery routing algorithms exhibit superior performance characteristics over their deadlock avoidance counterparts.