Wormhole Switching

Wormhole flow control, also called wormhole switching or wormhole routing is a system of simple flow control in computer networking based on known fixed links. It is a subset of flow control methods called Flit-Buffer Flow Control.

Actually, switching is the more appropriate term than routing. "Routing" defines the route or path taken to reach the destination. The wormhole technique does not dictate the route to the destination but decides when the packet moves forward from a router. Cut-through switching commonly called "Virtual Cut-through," operates in a similar manner, the major difference being that cut-through flow control allocates buffers and channel bandwidth on a packet level, while wormhole flow control does this on the flit level. In most respects, wormhole is very similar to ATM or MPLS forwarding, with the exception that the cell does not have to be queued.

Large network packets are broken into small pieces called flits (flow control digits). The first flit, called the header flit holds information about this packet's route (namely the destination address) and sets up the routing behavior for all subsequent flits associated with the packet. The head flit is followed by zero or more body flits, containing the actual pay load of data. The final flit, called the tail flit, performs some book keeping to close the connection between the two nodes. One thing special about wormhole flow control is the implementation of virtual channels.

A virtual channel holds the state needed to coordinate the handling of the flits of a packet over a channel. At a minimum, this state identifies the output channel of the current node for the next hop of the route and the state of the virtual channel (idle, waiting for resources, or active). The virtual channel may also include pointers to the flits of the packet that are buffered on the current node and the number of flit buffers available on the next node. (Dally and Towles 2004, p.237)

The name "wormhole" plays on the way packets are sent over the links: the address is so short that it can be translated before the message itself arrives. This allows the router to quickly set up the routing of the actual message and then "bow out" of the rest of the conversation. Since a packet is transmitted flit by flit, it may occupy several flit buffers along its path, creating a worm-like image. This, however, can be confusing since cut-through routing does the same thing.