A well known problem with wormhole-routed packet networks is the potentially large amount of blocking that packets can experience due to link contention. Because of the very limited amount of buffering in such networks, blocked packets remain in the network and keep using network resources. Thus, blocked packets may in turn cause other packets to be blocked. This may affect a large number of packets over a large portion of the network. Proper connection management strategies and appropriate protocols must be devised to ensure that blocking of packets due to link contention is bounded. In [3], ...