Efficient minimal routing in the triangular grid with six channels

Abstract

This paper describes an efficient novel router on the 6-valent triangular grid with toroidal connections, denoted "T-grid" in the sequel. The router uses six channels per node that can host up to six agents. The topological properties of the T-grid are given first, as well as a minimal routing scheme, as a basis for a Cellular Automata modeling of this new target searching problem. Each agent situated on a channel has a computed "minimal" direction defining the new channel in the adjacent node. When moving to the next node an agent can simultaneously hop to another channel. In the normal protocol the rightmost subpath (from the agent's point of view) is taken first. In addition, an adaptive routing protocol is defined, preferring the direction to an unoccupied channel. The novel router is significantly faster than an optimized reference router with only one agent per node that was designed before. In order to avoid deadlocks, the initial setting of the channels are alternated in space. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.