A high-performance fully adaptive routing based on software defined network-on-chip

Abstract

Adaptive routing techniques have been proven to be effective solutions for handling network congestion and enhancing the performance of Network-on-Chip (NoC). Traditional adaptive routing algorithms may degrade flexibility and lead to the issue of high hardware implementation overhead. In this paper, we propose a fully adaptive routing (FAR) based on Software Defined NoC (SDNoC) to address these issues. The proposed FAR decouples path selection from packet forwarding. The routing path is determined by software techniques in the control layer according to the global congestion status and is encapsulated into the packet to control the forwarding of the packet. Evaluation results show that the proposed FAR yields an improvement of performance over the typical routing schemes in average packet latency and saturation throughput up to 8.2% and 6.1% respectively. The layout area and power consumption are at least 6.2% and 3.9% less compared with the typical routing schemes as well.