Fault-tolerant broadcasting in 2-D wormhole-routed meshes

In this paper, a fault-tolerant broadcast scheme in 2-D meshes with randomly generated faults is provided. This approach is based on an early work on time-step optimal broadcasting in square-shape fault-free 2-D meshes with optimal total communication distance (TCD). An extension to any rectangular-shape fault-free 2-D meshes is first given. The fault block model is used in which all faulty nodes in the system are contained in a set of disjoint blocks. The boundary lines of blocks divide the whole mesh into a set of fault-free polygons and a sequence of rectangular fault-free regions is derived from these polygons. Then, the broadcast process is carried out at two levels: inter-region and intra-region. In inter-region-level broadcast, the broadcast message is sent from a given source to a special node (called eye) in each rectangular fault-free region. Then in intra-region-level broadcast, the extended optimal fault-free broadcast is applied. Some analytical results are given which include the upper bound of TCD of such a broadcast in 2-D wormhole-routed meshes.