Virtual channels have been introduced to enhance the performance of wormhole-switched networks. They are formed by arranging the buffer space dedicated to a given physical channel into multiple parallel buffers that share the physical bandwidth on a demand driven time-multiplexed manner. The question to be answered is: given a fixed amount of finite buffer what is the optimal way to arrange it into virtual channels. There have been few studies attempting to address this issue, however, these studies have so far resorted to simulation experiments and focused on deterministic routing algorithms. In this paper we use analytical performance models to investigate the optimal arrangement of the available buffer space into multiple virtual channels when adaptive routing is used in wormhole-switched k-ary ncubes.

Virtual channels have been introduced to enhance the performance of wormhole-switched networks. They are formed by arranging the buffer space dedicated to a given physical channel into multiple parallel buffers that share the physical bandwidth on a demand driven time-multiplexed manner. The questio...