Critical Bubble Scheme: An Efficient Implementation of Globally Aware Network Flow Control

Network flow control mechanisms that are aware of global conditions potentially can achieve higher performance than flow control mechanisms that are only locally aware. Owing to high implementation overhead, globally-aware flow control mechanisms in their purest form are seldom adopted in practice, leading to less efficient simplified implementations. In this paper, we propose an efficient implementation of a globally-aware flow control mechanism, called Critical Bubble Scheme, and apply it successfully to k-ary n-cube networks for the general class of buffer occupancy-based network flow control techniques. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can reduce the buffer access portion of packet latency by as much as 77%, leading to much lower average packet latency at medium and high network loads while sustaining 11% throughput improvement after network saturation.