Improving the reliability of the Benes network for use in large-scale systems

Systems with high computational capabilities are usually made of a large number of processing elements in order to solve complex problems efficiently. To achieve this purpose, the processing elements must be able to communicate with each other, which can be provided by interconnection networks. Meanwhile, multistage interconnection networks (MINs) are often recommended for use in such systems due to the efficiency and cost-effectiveness. However, there is a fundamental problem in the general structure of these networks called blocking. An important class of MINs is rearrangeable non-blocking MINs that can be used as a cost-effective solution to cope with the blocking problem. Benes network is one of the most popular rearrangeable non-blocking MINs, which has been considered by many researchers over the years. And yet its reliability improvement is an important factor that must be considered in the review of most systems, especially large-scale ones. Based on previous works, there are three main approaches to improve the reliability of MINs: (1) Adding a number of stages to MIN. (2) Using multiple MINs in parallel. (3) Using replicated MINs. In this paper, in order to find the best solution to improve the reliability of the Benes network, all three of these methods are investigated. Reliability analyses show that the use of multiple parallel Benes networks can obtain more advantages than other methods for Benes network. The approach improves the Benes network to be used in large-scale systems in various aspects of reliability namely time-independent terminal reliability, time-independent broadcast reliability, time-dependent terminal reliability, and time-dependent broadcast reliability. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.