Prevention of congestion in packet-switched multistage interconnection networks

This paper proposes a simple, yet effective scheme to prevent congestion in a packet-switched multistage interconnection network (MIN) caused by hot spots. In this scheme, switches in the second and third stages of the MIN monitor their buffer occupancy to detect any notable nonuniform access behavior. When a switch detects congestion, packets generated by processors will be blocked from entering the congested switch until the congestion is cleared. Our scheme is compared with two well known schemes and shown to exhibit significantly better performance than these two