2 REAL-TIME FLOW CONTROLS IN WORMHOLE NETWORKS

In this paper, we study wormhole routed networks and envision their su itability for real-time traffic in a priority-driven paradigm. A tradi tional blocking flow control in wormhole routing may lead to a priorit y inversion in the sense that high priority packets are blocked by low priority packets for unlimited time. The priority inversion causes th e frequent deadline missing even at a low network load. This paper the refore proposes two preemptive flow control policies where high priori ty packets can preempt network resources held by low priority packets. As a result, the proposed flow controls can resolve the priority inve rsion. Our simulations show that preemptive flow controls significantl y reduce deadline miss ratios for Various real-time traffic configurat ions.