On the design of network routers for multimedia applications

Parallel computing systems based on high performance interconnection networks are being used nowadays for online multimedia applications. The potential market of such applications seems to be large enough to justify a specific architecture oriented to support them. Wave switching is a hybrid switching technique for high performance routers which combines wormhole switching and circuit switching in the same router architecture. We propose the use of wave switching in parallel computing systems for applications like distributed multimedia systems or multicomputer based databases. These applications generate an intensive, bursty traffic together with a small percentage of control message traffic. For this kind of traffic, wave switching can considerably improve the throughput of a parallel computing system. Performance evaluation results show a drastic reduction in latency and an improvement in throughput with regard to networks with the same channel width using wormhole switching.