A new mechanism for congestion and deadlock resolution

Efficient and reliable communication is essential for achieving high performance in a networked computing environment. Limited network resources bring about unavoidable competition among in-flight packets, resulting in network congestion and possibly deadlock. Many techniques have been proposed to improve performance by efficiently handling network congestion and deadlock. However, none of them provide an efficient way of accelerating the movement of packets involved in congestion onward to their destinations. In this paper, we propose a new mechanism for the detection and resolution of network congestion and deadlocks. The proposed mechanism is based on increasing the scheduling priority of packets involved in congestion and providing necessary resources for those packets to make forward progress. Simulation results show that the proposed technique outperforms previously proposed techniques by effectively dispersing network congestion.