Wormhole Routing
Special case of virtual cut-through routing where the buffer size at each node is exactly 1 flit.
Because each buffer is exactly 1 flit, can introduce the idea of virtual channels
- A virtual channel is a buffer for 1 flit
- Several virtual channels can share one physical channel, timeshare the channel
- Can increase the throughput of the network
- Important to understand that the circuit formed by wormhole router network is one of virtual channels, which is time-multiplexed over the physical connections
- See Figure 17.9,17.10.