A traffic-balanced adaptive wormhole routing scheme for two-dimensional meshes

In this paper, we analyze several issues involved in developing low latency adaptive wormhole routing schemes for two-dimensional meshes. It is observed that along with adaptivity, balanced distribution of traffic has a significant impact on the system performance. Motivated by this observation, we develop a new fully adaptive routing algorithm called positive-first-negative-first for two-dimensional meshes. The algorithm uses only two virtual channels per physical channel creating two virtual networks. The messages are routed positive-first in one virtual network and negative-first in the other. Because of this combination, the algorithm distributes the system load uniformly throughout the network and is also fully adaptive. It is shown that the proposed algorithm results in providing better performance in terms of the average network latency and throughput when compared with the previously proposed routing algorithms