Wormhole routing i s a simple, low-cost switching scheme often used f o r supercomputer interconnections. Recently, at also has been applied t o high-speed local area networks t o support applications demanding high-datarate communications, such as cluster computing. T h e drawback t o wormhole routing i s its low link eficiency caused by w o r m blocking. T o overcome this blocking problem, a timeout scheme was investigated in [3] by analytical modeling. In this paper, we present timeout

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... tion results, showing t h e effect of packet size, propagation delay, and network size. Furthermore, a simple deflection scheme, which we call host deflection, i s introduced and tested. This simple host deflection scheme requires only small modifications t o t h e protocol and very little processing power f r o m t h e switches; it improves the network throughput significantly. 0-8186-7453-9/96 $