A Congestion Sense Network Interface

Although wormhole routing offers high throughput in an uncongested network, its throughput sharply drops whenever there is a congestion or blocking. This paper presents a congestion sense network interface to take preventive measures for avoiding congestion in wormhole routing at the expense of some hardware added to a processor-to-network interface. If network traffic is not high enough to cause congestion in worm-hole routing, the proposed network interface does not cause any adverse effect on the throughput. But, when network traffic is a congestion-prone traffic, the proposed interface takes preventive measures so that the throughput of wormhole routing is prevented from being dropped sharply.