A new approach to improve reliability of the multistage interconnection networks

Because of their cost-effectiveness, multistage interconnection networks are widely used in parallel multiprocessor systems to make a connection among the processors and memory modules. One of the most important requirements for these communication systems is reliability. Adding a number of stages to these networks is one of the main approaches to promote this issue. Despite its modest cost and ease of implementation, this approach improves the reliability only to a small extent, which is not desirable, especially for large-scale systems. In this paper, we propose a new approach to improve reliability of the networks, called reducing nodes. Extensive reliability analyses from two major perspectives, terminal and broadcast, demonstrate that this idea can achieve a tremendous advantage over the aforementioned approach.