A Markov chain based method for NoC end-to-end latency evaluation

Abstract

This paper presents a generic analytical method to estimate communication latency between a source and a destination of a given Network-on-Chip. This method is based on Markov chain stochastic processes. In order to solve the limiting problem of state-space explosion in complex stochastic processes, we propose to construct a reduced Markov chain model for each node of the path, and to recursively use the local mean latencies to obtain the mean latency of the complete path. Comparison between the analytical results obtained by our method and those of a corresponding SystemC CABA simulation platform shows the accuracy of our method.