Abstract: Wormhole routing is an effective way to provide very high speed, very low latency communication for distributed real-time applications with high bandwidth demands. Unfortunately, the lack of traffic buffering mechanism or existing narrow buffer space in the switching devices makes it difficult to give real-time guarantees to traffic streams that contend for communication links. In this paper we proposed a simple blocking model for traffic on wormhole-routed networks and derived a distributed admission control scheme for real-time traffic streams. As criteria evaluating the performance, we measured the average number of currently admitted connections in the network during steady state to analyze the behavior of the scheme for varying network loads and bandwidth requirements of the connections. The results show that this distributed admission control scheme is sufficient to meet real-time requirements.

Key words: wormhole routing networks, distributed admission control, real-time applications