Designing optimal fault-tolerant star networks

The advance in VLSI technology and the continuing decline in the cost of computer hardware have made the construction of complex networks with many processors economically feasible. Due to the complexity of such systems, reliability has become a major issue. In some applications, it is critical that the system must be able to operate correctly despite the presence of certain faults. Multiprocessor networks with such capability are called fault‐tolerant networks. These networks increase reliability by replicating some of the basic components, i.e., by including spare processors and interconnection links. The problem that arises naturally is that of minimizing the spare components that are needed to tolerate failure. In this paper, we consider this problem when the network under consideration is organized in the form of a star. The paper describes how to design optimal m‐FT (m‐fault‐tolerant) graphs with respect to the star configuration, for all values of m ≥ 0.