Analysis of deterministic routing in k-ary n-cubes with virtual channels

Adding virtual channels to wormhole-routed networks greatly improves performance because they reduce blocking by acting as "bypass" lanes for non-blocked messages. Although several analytical models have been proposed in the literature for k-ary n-cubes with deterministic routing, most of them have not included the effects of virtual channel multiplexing on network performance. This paper proposes a new and simple analytical model to compute message latency in k-ary n-cubes with an arbitrary number of virtual channels. Results from simulation experiments confirm that the proposed model exhibits a good degree of accuracy for various network sizes and under different operating conditions. The proposed model is then used to investigate the relative performance merits of two different organisations of virtual channels.