Compressionless Routing (CR) is a new adaptive routing framework which supports both adaptive and fault-tolerant routing while eliminating much of the software overhead for buffer management and retransmission. The basic idea is to use the fine-grained flow control and backpressure of wormhole routing to communicate routing status and error conditions to network interfaces. The network interface uses the information to detect possible deadlock situations and network faults and recover from them, eliminating the need for costly network protocol layers.
Advantages of Compressionless Routing include, deadlock-free adaptive routing with no virtual channels (any topology), simple router implementations, end-to-end flow control in hardware, and order-preserving message transmission. Fault tolerant Compressionless Routing (FCR) extends CR, providing end-to-end fault-tolerant delivery with the following advantages: tolerance of transient faults while maintaining data integrity (nonstop fault-tolerance), tolerance of permanent faults, applicability to a wide variety of network topologies, and eliminates software buffering for reliability.
For more information about Compressionless Routing, see:
Last updated 2 November 1995