Performance modelling of pipelined circuit switching in hypercubes with hot spot traffic

Pipelined Circuit Switching (PCS) has been suggested as an efficient switching method for supporting interprocessor communication in multicomputer networks due to its ability to preserve both communication performance and fault-tolerant demands in these networks. A number of studies have demonstrated that PCS can exhibit superior performance characteristics over Wormhole Switching (WS) under uniform traffic. However, the performance properties of PCS have not yet been thoroughly investigated in the presence of non-uniform traffic. Analytical model of PCS for common networks (e.g., hypercube) under the uniform traffic pattern has been reported in the literature. A non-uniform traffic model that has attracted much attention is the hot spot model which leads to extreme network congestion resulting in serious performance degradation due to the tree saturation phenomenon in the network. An analytical model for WS with hot spot traffic has been reported in the literature. However, to the best of our knowledge, there has not been reported any analytical model for PCS augmented with virtual channels in the presence of hot spot traffic. This paper proposes a model for this switching mechanism using new methods to calculate the probability of message header blocking and hot spot rates on channels. The model makes latency predictions that are in good agreement with those obtained through simulation experiments. An extensive performance comparison using the new analytical model reveals that PCS performs the same or in some occasions worse than WS in the presence of hot spot traffic.