Reliable Flow Control Coding in Low-Buffer Grid Networks

We consider a grid network where nodes contain small buffers. A packet that faces a crowded buffer in its route will get extra latency and may be dropped. In this paper, we propose a novel flow control protocol called RFCC for grid networks. RFCC tries to reroute delayed packets and utilizes network coding to introduce a configurable amount of redundant information in the network, thereby increasing reliability in the face of packet loss. RFCC contains a number of mechanisms to adapt to the traffic model on a grid interconnection network in a multiprocessor system. Our simulation experiments show that RFCC improves reliability with comparable traffic overhead compared to the case in which RFCC is not used.