Design of a Router for Fault-Tolerant Networks

. As interconnection networks grow larger and larger, the need for reliable message delivery in the presence of faults grows as well. Unfortunately, most network routing schemes currently in use do not provide graceful tolerance of even the most common faults. Because routing messages around failed components requires non-minimal routing, it makes sense to examine routers which, by design, allow packets to take nonminimal routes. Such routers provide a basic level of fault-tolerance by allowing messages to be routed around faults, without requiring a priori knowledge of their locations. However, the mechanisms can be slow and clumsy at times. We augment Chaotic routing, a non-minimal adaptive routing scheme, with a limited amount of hardware to support fault detection, identification, and reconfiguration so that the network can automatically reconfigure itself when faults occur. We present a high-level design of these mechanisms, driven by the goal of achieving reasonable ..