Multistage interconnection network reliability

The authors examine the reliability of a unique-path multistage interconnection network (MIN) and a fault-tolerant scheme aimed at improving system reliability. They derive closed-form expressions for the time-dependent reliability of the 8×8 and 16×16 shuffle-exchange multistage interconnection networks (SENs) and SENs with an addition state (SEN+). These expressions are derived without any assumptions regarding the underlying component-lifetime distributions. They derive a tight reliability lower bound that is useful for the analysis of larger networks. They provide numerical results for networks as large as 1024×1024