A Low-Latency Adaptive NoC Routing Scheme Based on Traffic Monitoring

Abstract

In Network-on-Chip (NoC), finding the optimal routing scheme is a crucial yet intractable problem, which directly affects the performance of the NoC. Compared with static routing, adaptive routing schemes are capable of adapting to the changes in the network traffic, resulting in improved network performance. Using historical traffic load as the sole evidence to determine the next routing scheme is unnecessary to result in low transmission latency. In this paper, we propose a novel low- latency adaptive NoC routing scheme based on traffic monitoring mechanism. The traffic monitor keeps surveilling network congestion state, together with the traffic volume to be transmitted. The latter is used to predicate the latency for each router. The weighted sum of the traffic load and transmission latency are employed to determine the redistribution of the traffic. The experimental results show that the transmission latency has been improved by 19%–58.9% using our method in most cases, com- pared with conventional routing scheme.