Fault-tolerant and deadlock-free routing in 2-D meshes using rectilinear-monotone polygonal fault blocks

Abstract

We propose a deterministic fault-tolerant and deadlock-free routing protocol in 2-dimensional (2-D) meshes based on Wu's fault-tolerant odd–even turn model and Wang's rectilinear-monotone polygonal fault block model. The fault-tolerant odd–even turn protocol, also called extended X–Y routing, was originally proposed to achieve fault-tolerant and deadlock-free routing among traditional, rectangular fault blocks. It uses no virtual channels. The number of faults to be tolerated is unbounded as long as nodes outside fault blocks are connected in the mesh network. The recently proposed rectilinear-monotone polygonal fault blocks (also called minimal-connected-components or MCCs) are of the polygonal shapes, and are a refinement of rectangular fault blocks. The formation of MCCs depends on the relative locations of source and destination, and MCCs include far fewer healthy nodes in resultant fault blocks. In this paper, we show that with a simple modification, the extended X–Y routing can also be applied to 2-D meshes using extended MCCs.