This paper identifies performance degradation in wormhole routed k-ary n-cube networks due
to limited number of router-to-processor consumption channels at each node. Many recent research
in wormhole routing have advocated the advantages of adaptive routing and virtual channel flow
control schemes to deliver better network performance. This paper indicates that the advantages
associated with these schemes can not be realized with limited consumption capacity. To alleviate
such performance bottleneck, a new network interface design using multiple consumption channels
is proposed. To match virtual multiplexing on network channels, we also propose each consumption
channel to support multiple virtual consumption channels. The impact of message arrival rate at
a node on the required number of consumption channel is studied analytically. It is shown that
wormhole networks with higher routing adaptivity, dimensionality, degree of hot-spot traffic, and
number of virtual lanes have to take advantage of multiple consumption channels to deliver better
performance. The interplay between system topology, routing algorithm, number of virtual lanes,
messaging overheads, and communication traffic is studied through simulation to derive the effective
number of consumption channels required in a system. Using the on-going technological trend, it is
shown that wormhole-routed systems can use up to 2-4 consumption channels per node to deliver
better system performance.