Efficient buffering techniques for deflection routing in high speed networks

Deflection routing is a simple, decentralized, and adaptive routing methodology for communication networks. We focus on deflection routing in the Benes network. Since deflection routing forces packets to take multiple paths to the destination, packets may arrive out of sequence. This requires the use of a reassembly window at the destination. We estimate the effect of a finite reassembly window on the performance of deflection routing under both uniform and nonuniform traffic conditions. We also investigate the effect of output buffering at intermediate nodes. Both methods improve performance significantly. We also discuss the performance of deflection routing in networks of different sizes.