Analyzing the reliability of shuffle-exchange networks using reliability block diagrams

•The impact of increasing the number of stages on reliability of MINs is investigated.•The RBD method as an accurate method is used for the reliability analysis of MINs.•Complex series–parallel RBDs are used to determine the reliability of the MINs.•All measures of the reliability (i.e. terminal, broadcast, and network reliability) are analyzed.•All reliability equations will be calculated for different size N×N.

Supercomputers and multi-processor systems are comprised of thousands of processors that need to communicate in an efficient way. One reasonable solution would be the utilization of multistage interconnection networks (MINs), where the challenge is to analyze the reliability of such networks. One of the methods to increase the reliability and fault-tolerance of the MINs is use of various switching stages. Therefore, recently, the reliability of one of the most common MINs namely shuffle-exchange network (SEN) has been evaluated through the investigation on the impact of increasing the number of switching stage. Also, it is concluded that the reliability of SEN with one additional stage (SEN+) is better than SEN or SEN with two additional stages (SEN+2), even so, the reliability of SEN is better compared to SEN with two additional stages (SEN+2). Here we re-evaluate the reliability of these networks where the results of the terminal, broadcast, and network reliability analysis demonstrate that SEN+ and SEN+2 continuously outperform SEN and are very alike in terms of reliability.