Toward Fault-Tolerant Deadlock-Free Routing in HyperSurface-Embedded Controller Networks

IEEE Networking Letters, vol 2, 140--144, year 2020 HyperSurfaces (HSFs) consist of structurally reconfigurable metasurfaces whose electromagnetic properties can be changed via a software interface, using an embedded miniaturized network of controllers. With the HSF controllers, interconnected in an irregular, near-Manhattan geometry, we propose a robust, deterministic Fault-Tolerant (FT), deadlock- and livelock-free routing protocol where faults are contained in a set of disjointed rectangular regions called faulty blocks. The proposed FT protocol can support an unbounded number of faulty nodes as long as nodes outside the faulty blocks are connected. Simulation results show the efficacy of the proposed FT protocol under various faulty node distribution scenarios.