Fault-tolerant wormhole routing using a variation of the distributed recovery block approach

A fault-tolerant wormhole routing technique that incorporates a variation of the distributed recovery block (DRB) approach is described. The section of a parallel system that spans between the source and destination nodes is dynamically partitioned into overlapping DRB groups. A DRB group consists of a current node, a primary and an alternate successor node. The message packets travel towards the destination from one DRB group to the next group. A prototype of the routing system is implemented for mesh and hypercube topologies; however, the method can be used for topologies with a minimum node connectivity of three. The simulation results indicate that the DRB approach based wormhole routing tolerates both node and link failures