The impact of virtual channel allocation on the performance of deterministic wormhole-routed k-ary n-cubes

Virtual channels yield significant improvement in the performance of wormhole-routed networks as they can greatly reduce message blocking over network resources. K-ary n-cubes with deterministic routing have been widely analysed using analytical modelling tools. Most existing models, however, have either entirely ignored the effects of virtual channel multiplexing or have not considered the impact of virtual channels allocation on message latency. This paper discusses two different organisations of virtual channels in k-ary n-cubes, resulting in two deterministic routing algorithms. It then proposes an analytical model to compute message latency for the two routing algorithms. The proposed model is used in a case study to demonstrate the sensitivity of network latency to the way virtual channels are allocated to messages.