A Design for the Switching Element of a Fault-Tolerant Multistage Interconnection Network

A class of multipath multistage interconnection networks (MINs) is presented in this paper. These MINs can be designed to have the degree of fault-tolerance desired. They are dynamically reroutable but have low link complexity. The proposed MINs feature links between switches belonging to the same stage, and the number adjacent stages is the same as in unique path MINs. The paths available from a source to a destination have varying lengths. Reliability analyses, including terminal reliability, mean time to failure and steady state availability are given. The reliability figures compare favorably with those of other multiple path MINs. The performance analysis of the MINs in circuit switched environment shows that the acceptance probability of requests is significantly increased while the average path length is close to that in the unique path MINs.