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Wormhole switching refers to a simple flow control system in a computer network that is primarily based on fixed links. Wormhole switching is a subclass of a flow control method that is known as flit-buffer flow control.
Although wormhole switching and wormhole routing are used to describe the same phenomenon, this technique does not direct any path or route to reach some specific destination over the network. However, it only generates a decision about the timing for routing packets from the router.
May also be referred to as wormhole routing or wormhole flow control.
The term wormhole switching is sometimes confused with cut-through switching but they are different in the sense that cut-through flow control assigns channel bandwidth and buffers on packet level, while wormhole flow control allocates them on flit level. The wormhole system is actually quite similar to multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) and asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) forwarding except that the cells are not placed in queues.
The characteristics of wormhole switching system include:
The key advantages of wormhole switching include:
Disadvantages of wormhole switching include:
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