Failure dependent performance analysis of a fault-tolerant multistage interconnection network

To provide fault tolerance and improve system reliability and performance, a class of fault-tolerant multistage interconnection networks, called augmented shuffle-exchange networks (ASENs) has been proposed. ASENs are gracefully degradable; although an individual component failure reduces ASEN performance, it does not cause a total network failure. The purpose of this work is to analyze how these component failures affect ASEN performance. A key step in performance and reliability modeling is the choice of an appropriate metric for analysis. Because network bandwidth can be an inadequate performance measure when fault are present. The authors consider other network performance measures, including the interreference time distribution for individual outputs (memories)