Corrections to Chen and Chiu's Fault Tolerant Routing Algorithm for Mesh Networks

Chen and Chiu published a fault tolerant routing algorithm for mesh topology networks [1] which they claimed was deadlock free in the presence of multiple faults. In this paper we give a counter-example to show that their Message-Route algorithm [1] fails to provide deadlock free routing in a 2 dimensional mesh network. We also point out certain cases where the algorithm fails to route messages to their destinations. We identify an error in the proof of the main theorem in their paper [1] which was used for proving the property of deadlock freeness. Changes to their algorithm are proposed to make it deadlock free and complete. We also discuss a new application of fault tolerant routing algorithms for non-homogeneous 2-dimensional mesh topology networks for on-chip communication.