High-speed networks use lightweight protocols and a simple switch architecture for achieving higher speeds. A lightweight switching technique for local area and campus environments is wormhole routing, in which the head of a packet (worm), upon arriving at an intermediate switch, is immediately forwarded to the next switch on the path. Thus, the packet, like a worm, may stretch across several intermediate switches and links. Wormhole routing networks provide low latency. However, they are particularly prone to congestion, thus requiring careful flow control. The authors consider high-speed, asynchronous, unslotted wormhole routing networks. For such networks, two different flow control mechanisms are compared and contrasted, namely, backpressure flow control and deflection routing (with local input rate control). With backpressure, in order to maintain deadlock-free routing, either up/down routing or shortest path routing with virtual channels is assumed. With deflection routing, to avoid livelocks, worm alignment (delayed deflection) is performed at the switches. It is shown via simulation that the throughput performance of the two schemes is comparable (except for up/down routing). The authors also discuss the tradeoffs with respect to the complexity of hardware, routing protocols and buffer requirements. The authors further examine the role of input rate control at the hosts to overcome unbounded delays typical of deflection routing, and show it is possible to achieve lower average number of hops and transit delays by employing suitable input rate control policies.
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