On improving the performance of shared buffered banyan networks

The paper investigates three methods that will improve the performance of shared buffered banyan networks: cut through routing, biased conflict resolution, and speedup. The authors present analytical and simulation results for a shared buffered banyan multistage interconnection network (MIN) consisting of 2/spl times/2 (2 input and 2 output) switch elements (SEs) subjected to both uniform and unbalanced traffic patterns, with and without speedup. They show that when no speedup is used, the adoption of cut through routing in a shared buffered banyan MIN significantly improves the performance of the MIN. However when speedup at high loads is employed, the performance of the MIN is largely dependent on the size of the shared buffer in each SE and the output buffer size. They also propose two conflict resolution algorithms to improve MIN performance.