Deep versus Parallel Buffers in Wormhole Switched k-Ary n-Cubes Abstract

Virtual channels have been introduced to enhance the performance of wormhole-switched networks. They are formed by arranging the buffer space dedicated to a given physical channel into multiple parallel buffers that share the physical bandwidth in a demand driven time-multiplexed manner. There have been few attempts to study the optimal arrangement of virtual channels (i.e. given a fixed amount of finite buffer what is the optimal way to arrange it into virtual channels). However, these studies have so fare resorted to simulation experiments and focused on deterministic routing algorithms. In this paper we use analytical performance models to investigate the optimal arrangement of the available buffer space into multiple virtual channels when adaptive routing is used in wormhole-switched k-ary n-cubes. 1