Determining the reliability importance of switching elements in the shuffle-exchange networks

Multistage interconnection networks (MINs) are good choices to make the connection between processor nodes/memory modules for multiprocessor systems due to their cost effectiveness. However, these networks are basically non-fault-tolerant, which makes them an unreliable network. So far, various methods have been developed to improve the fault tolerance of the MINs. However, all of these methods are designed without considering the sensitive points of their systems. Nowadays, in modern approaches for effective improving fault tolerance, a basic requirement is to perform reliability importance analysis to identify crucial components in a system should be improved. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to analyse the reliability importance of switching elements in one of the most famous MINs called shuffle-exchange network (SEN) and its variants namely SEN+ (SEN with one additional stage) and SEN+2 (SEN with two additional stages). This study has two important achievements: first, by replacement of sensitive elements, it reaches high-reliable networks; second, fault avoidance can be used as a substitute for fault tolerance methodology by using high-reliability switching elements and it is usually less expensive than fault tolerance.