Editing Wormhole switching (section)

{{Short description|Data flow control switching method}}
{{Use American English|date = March 2019}}
'''Wormhole flow control''', also called '''wormhole switching''' or '''wormhole routing''', is a system of simple [[flow control (data)|flow control]] in [[computer network]]ing based on known fixed links. It is a subset of flow control methods called ''flit-buffer flow control''.<ref name="Dally and Towles">{{cite book |author1=William James Dally |author2=Brian Towles |title=Principles and Practices of Interconnection Networks|chapter=13.2.1|publisher=Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, Inc|year = 2004|isbn=978-0-12-200751-4}}</ref>{{rp|Chapter 13.2.1}}

Switching is a more appropriate term than routing, as "routing" defines the route or path taken to reach the destination.<ref>{{cite book|author=John L. Hennessy and David A. Patterson|title=Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach|edition=Fourth|chapter=Appendix E.5|publisher=Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, Inc|year=2006|isbn=978-0-12-370490-0}}</ref><ref name="Mohapatra" >{{Citation | last = Mohapatra
 | first = Prasant
 | title = Wormhole Routing Techniques for Directly Connected Multicomputer Systems
 | journal = ACM Computing Surveys
 | volume = 30
 | issue = 3
 | pages = 374–410
 | year = 1998
 | url = http://www.mathcs.emory.edu/~avani/wormhole/1998-p374-mohapatra.pdf
 | doi = 10.1145/292469.292472 | citeseerx = 10.1.1.11.9098
 | s2cid = 7850481
 }}</ref> The wormhole technique does not dictate the route to the destination but decides when the packet moves forward from a router.

Wormhole switching is widely used in multicomputers because of its low latency and small requirements at the nodes.<ref name="Mohapatra" />{{rp|376}}

Wormhole routing supports very [[Network delay|low-latency]], high-speed, guaranteed delivery of packets suitable for [[real-time communication]].<ref>
Sharad Sundaresan; Riccardo Bettati.
[http://faculty.cs.tamu.edu/bettati/Papers/icdcs1997.myrinet/html/node2.html "Distributed Connection Management for Real-Time Communication over Wormhole-Routed Networks"]. 1997.
</ref>