Tolerating Faults in a Mesh with a Row of Spare Nodes

Bruck, J., R. Cypher and C.-T. Ho, Tolerating faults in a mesh with a row ofspare nodes, Theoretical Computer Science 128 (1994) 241-252. We present an efficient method for tolerating faults in a two-dimensional mesh architecture. Our approach is based on adding spare components (nodes) and extra links (edges) such that the resulting architecture can be reconfigured as a mesh in the presence of faults. We optimize the cost of the fault-tolerant mesh architecture by adding about one row of redundant nodes in addition to a set of k spare nodes (while tolerating up to k node faults) and minimizing the number of links per node. Our results are surprisingly efficient and seem to be practical for small values of k. The degree of the fault-tolerant architecture is k + 5 for odd k, and k f6 for even k. Our results can be generalized to d-dimensional meshes.