A Multi-Path Routing Scheme for Torus-Based NOCs

Abstract

In Networks-on-Chip (NoC) designs, crosstalk noise has become a serious issue which may cause the communication channel unreliable. The crosstalk problem can be mitigated by wide spacing of serial lines. However, the wider spacing of serial lines will reduce the number of the lines, thus reduce the data throughput. In this paper, a new fully adaptive multi-path routing (MPR) scheme is proposed to maximize the data throughput by utilizing multiple paths for concurrent data transmission. For the proposed MPR algorithm, two transport models are considered: the full-wire-bank transport model (FM) and the half-wire-bank transport model (HM). Theoretical analysis shows that the MPR scheme under both FM and HM achieves improvement in data throughput when single pair of nodes are in communication. When multiple pairs of nodes are in communication, simulation results demonstrate that the MPR scheme under FM significantly improves the normalized accepted traffic and throughput as well as average message latency than the YX routing algorithm in most network loads.