Testing and fault tolerance properties in a class of sorting networks

Sorting networks are an important application for parallel processing and also can be used as interconnection networks with fast and simple self routing algorithm. The odd-even transposition sorting networks are an important class of sorting networks because of the ease of hardware implementation. The paper investigates testing and fault tolerant properties of such networks for single stuck at crossing (stuck at X) and stuck at straight (stuck at T) faults in the comparators. We have proved that a single test vector is sufficient to detect all single and multiple stuck at T faults. For stuck at X faults, we have shown that the networks are 1-fault tolerant for large number of comparators. Analysis of several examples support the conjecture that these networks are 1-fault tolerant for all internal comparators