FRoots: A Fault Tolerant and Topology-Flexible Routing Technique

Existing solutions for fault-tolerant routing in interconnection networks either work for only one given regular topology, or require slow and costly network reconfigurations that do not allow full and continuous network access. In this paper, we present FRroots, a routing method for fault tolerance in topology-flexible network technologies. Our method is based on redundant paths, and can handle single dynamic faults without sending control messages other than those that are needed to inform the source nodes of the failing component. Used in a modus with local rerouting, the source nodes need not be informed and no control messages are necessary for the network to stay connected despite of a single fault. In fault-free networks under nonuniform traffic our routing method performs comparable to, or even better than, topology specific routing algorithms in regular networks like meshes and tori. FRoots does not require any other features in the switches or end nodes than a flexible routing table, and a modest number of virtual channels. For that reason, it can be directly applied to several present day technologies like InfiniBand and advanced switching