The Performance of Routing Algorithms under Bursty Traffic Loads

Routing algorithms are traditionally evaluated under Poisson-like traffic distributions. This type of traffic is smooth over large time intervals and has been shown not necessarily to be representative to that of real network loads in parallel processing and communication environments. Bursty traffic, on the other hand, has been shown to be more representative of the type of load generated by multiprocessor and local area network (LAN) applications, but it has been seldom used in the evaluation of network routing algorithms. This paper investigates how bursty traffic— specifically, self-similar traffic—affects the performance of well-known interconnection network routing algorithms. Various packet sizes, network resources (i.e., virtual channels) and spatial traffic patterns are used in the analysis. This allows the ability to evaluate performance under load non-uniformities in both time and space which differs from previous research that applies non-uniformity in only the space domain, such as with bit-reversal, matrix transpose, and hot-spot traffic patterns.