At each stage, adjacent pairs of inputs are connected to a simple exchange element, which can be set either straight (pass inputs directly through to outputs) or crossed (send top input to bottom output, and vice versa). For N processing element, an Omega network contains N/2 switches at each stage, and log2N stages. The manner in which these switches are set determines the connection paths available in the network at any given time. Two such methods are destination-tag routing and XOR-tag routing, discussed in detail below.