Tolerating faults in a mesh with a row of spare nodes

Abstract

We present an efficient method for tolerating faults in a two-dimensional mesh architecture. Our approach is based on adding spare components (nodes) and extra links (edges) such that the resulting architecture can be reconfigured as a mesh in the presence of faults. We optimize the cost of the fault-tolerant mesh architecture by adding about one row of redundant nodes in addition to a set of k spare nodes (while tolerating up to k node faults) and minimizing the number of links per node. Our results are surprisingly efficient and seem to be practical for small values of k. The degree of the fault-tolerant architecture is k + 5 for odd k, and k + 6 for even k. Our results can be generalized to d-dimensional meshes such that the number of spare nodes is less than the length of the shortest axis plus k, and the degree of the fault-tolerant mesh is (d-1)k+d+3 when k is odd and (d-1)k+2d+2 when k is even.