Efficient handling of message-dependent deadlock

The existence of multiple message types and associated inter-message dependencies may cause message-dependent deadlock in networks that are designed to be free of routing deadlock. Most methods currently used for dealing with message-dependent deadlocks require more system resources than are necessary and/or do not use system resources efficiently. This may have an adverse effect on system performance if resources are scarce. In this paper, we evaluate different approaches for handling message-dependent deadlocks, and we propose an alternative technique based on progressive deadlock recovery. Results show that the proposed technique relaxes restrictions considerably, allowing the routing of packets and handling of message-dependent deadlocks to be much more efficient-particularly when network resources are scarce