A Decision Procedure for Deadlock-Free Routing in Wormhole Networks

作者：Verbeek Freek^*; Schmaltz Julien

来源：IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, 2014, 25(8): 1935-1944.

DOI：10.1109/TPDS.2013.121

• Communication networks
• deadlocks
• routing protocols
• automatic verification
• formal methods

Deadlock freedom is a key challenge in the design of communication networks. Wormhole switching is a popular switching technique, which is also prone to deadlocks. Deadlock analysis of routing functions is a manual and complex task. We propose an algorithm that automatically proves routing functions deadlock-free or outputs a minimal counter-example explaining the source of the deadlock. Our algorithm is the first to automatically check a necessary and sufficient condition for deadlock-free routing. We illustrate its efficiency in a complex adaptive routing function for torus topologies. Results are encouraging. Deciding deadlock freedom is co-NP-Complete for wormhole networks. Nevertheless, our tool proves a 13 x 13 torus deadlock-free within seconds. Finding minimal deadlocks is more difficult. Our tool needs four minutes to find a minimal deadlock in a 11 x 11 torus while it needs nine hours for a 12 x 12 network.

• 出版日期2014-8