Practical Deadlock-Free Fault-Tolerant Routing in Meshes Based on the Planar Network Fault Model

The number of virtual channels required for deadlock-free routing is important for cost-effective and high-performance system design. The planar adaptive routing scheme is an effective deadlock avoidance technique using only three virtual channels for each physical channel in 3D or higher dimensional mesh networks with a very simple deadlock avoidance scheme. However, there exist one idle virtual channel for all physical channels along the first dimension and two idle virtual channels for channels along the last dimension in a mesh network based on the planar adaptive routing algorithm. A new deadlock avoidance technique is proposed for 3D meshes using only two virtual channels by making full use of the idle channels. The deadlock-free adaptive routing scheme is then modified to a deadlock-free adaptive fault-tolerant routing scheme based on a planar network (PN) fault model. The proposed deadlock-free adaptive routing scheme is also extended to n-dimensional meshes still using two virtual channels. Sufficient simulation results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.