The case of chaotic routing revisited

Abstract

This paper presents a new evaluation of the Chaos router, a cut-through non-minimal adaptive router, which was reported to reach 95% of its theoretical throughput limit, at the time where most router proposals only reached 60 to 80%. We will revisit the Chaos router design, provide a new vision of its strengths and relate them to the state-of-the-art in adaptive router design. In particular, our analysis has identified a parameter of the router design that was not emphasized in the network evaluation presented by their authors, but that is the key to its outstanding performance. This parameter is the channel operation mode. By using the links in half-duplex mode, it allows adjacent network nodes to allocate their bandwidth to one or the other direction in response to the traffic needs. This channel operation mode reduces base latency and increases network throughput compared to full duplex mode for most synthetic traffic patterns.