Combining In-Transit Buffers with Optimized Routing Schemes to Boost the Performance of Networks with Source Routing

Abstract. In previous papers we proposed the ITB mechanism to improve the performance of up*/down * routing in irregular networks with source routing. With this mechanism, both minimal routing and a better use of network links are guaranteed, resulting on an overall network performance improvement. In this paper, we show that the ITB mechanism can be used with any source routing scheme in the COW environment. In particular, we apply ITBs to DFS and routing algorithms, which provide better routes than up*/down * routing. Results show that ITB strongly improves DFS and Smart throughput (by 63 % and 23%, res-pectively, for 64-switch networks).