New interconnection patterns for multihop MANs

A new class of interconnection patterns, the "baffle" pattern, is introduced. Such patterns are characterized by the minimum average internodal distance, and are determined by a powerful heuristic search employing the A* algorithm. We propose the baffle patterns as an alternative to the traditional candidates (manhattan and shuffle patterns) in the application scenario of the multihop metropolitan area networks. The reported performance results show that in buffered networks the baffle patterns have a throughput performance significantly better than manhattan and shuffle. In unbuffered networks baffle is worse than manhattan, but performs still better than shuffle.