A Very Efficient Distributed Deadlock Detection Mechanism for Wormhole Networks

Networks using wormhole switching have traditionally relied upon deadlock avoidance strategies for the design of routing algorithms. More recently, deadlock recovery strategies have begun to gain acceptance. Progressive deadlock recovery techniques are very attractive because they allocate a few dedicated resources to quickly deliver deadlocked messages, instead of killing them. However, the distributed deadlock detection techniques proposed up to now detect many false deadlocks, especially when the network is heavily loaded and messages have different lengths. As a consequence, messages detected as deadlocked may saturate the bandwidth offered by recovery resources, thus degrading performance considerably. In this paper we propose an improved distributed deadlock detection mechanism that uses only local information, detects all the deadlocks, considerably reduces the probability of false deadlock detection and is not strongly affected by variations in message length and message destination distribution.