Message Scheduling on a Wormhole-Switched Linear Client-Server Network

The advantage of wormhole switching in interconnection networks is its distance insensitivity of communication latency under light traffic. However, this property vanishes when traffic is heavy. We consider the performance of a linear wormhole-switched network used as a real-time client-server network. Messages generated by client hosts are periodically transmitted to a central server within a predictable delivery time. We present two algorithms for generating feasible message transmission schedules and compare their performances. It is shown that trade-off exists between quality of schedules and the network utilization. Several open problems are posed.